With advance praise from Stephen Graham jones and Deesha Philyaw, Worshipping the Sun is Cara Lynn Albert’s debut collection of eleven linked stories, publishing August 3, 2027 from Santa Fe Writers Project.
Welcome to Florida, just a few degrees stranger than the one you thought you knew. The swamps steam, the theme parks creak, and the anthropomorphic Gator people (bipedal, scaled, and often over nine feet tall) move at the edges of “civilized” society. But it’s the humans who reveal the sharpest teeth.
Across these stories, family fracture, grief, desire, and queer identity collide in uncanny, darkly funny encounters. A woman seeks answers about her queerness from a Gator psychic. A Gator man wakes up in the body of a teenage theme park employee. A wealthy man reconnects with his estranged sister the weekend of her drag show. And, at the end of the world, a woman rides an alligator toward her last chance at reconciliation with her father as the Earth spins closer to the sun.
Blending fabulism with emotional and social insight, Worshipping the Sun is a haunting portrait of a world where the borders between species and identities grow thin, and what’s human isn’t always humane.
“A painfully hilarious x-ray of all things Florida, written with tenderness and rage, nostalgia and disgust.”
— Stephen Graham Jones, Author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter and
The Only Good Indians
“A fantastic, heartbreaking, funny, weird-ass collection.”
— Deesha Philyaw, Author of The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman and
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
“From gator girls to gator nuggets to alligators saddled for postapocalyptic transportation, the stories in Cara Albert’s searing debut are fierce, funny, and fantastically Florida. A book that demands you savor every bite.”
— David James Poissant, Author of Lake Life and The Heaven of Animals
