Ten top linked story collections

Amy Parker was born in Okinawa, Japan, and spent most of her childhood on diplomatic and military compounds overseas. She returned to the United States after her high school graduation and attended Indiana University, where she studied comparative literature. She won a Michener fellowship in fiction from the University of Texas, Austin. Afterward, she spent four years doing intensive monastic practice at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Soto Zen monastery in the United States, and at Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center in Mill Valley, California. She received lay ordination in the Soto Zen lineage in 2007. She left the monastery for the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she graduated in 2012. She currently lives in Wichita with her son.

Parker's debut story collection is Beasts and Children.

One of the author's ten favorite linked story collections, as shared at Publishers Weekly:

Jesus' Son
by Denis Johnson

This book was everywhere in the late '90s, and for good reason. Johnson’s images are indelible. A naked woman flown like a kite; a Mennonite couple making love in Iowa; a pour of whiskey trembling at the rim of a shot glass; a man with a knife in his eye. The writing is spare, smart, and beautiful. The stories hurt to read—as we follow FH (Fuckhead) through his mess of a life, seeking connection, seeking redemption, and finding it in stolen moments and unexpected places.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: Beasts and Children.

--Marshal Zeringue