The Albino Album: A Novel [Paperback]

Emerging author Chavisa Woods has been noted for capturing a strange, troubling vision of domestic life in the rural U.S. (Go Magazine). Here she presents a technicolored vision of rural adolescence, the story of a girl with an unpronounceable name—a fiery, unhinged, growling, big-hearted country girl in a dirty black tutu and combat boots who travels along all the bizarre yet familiar byways of human desire from the cornfields of Louisiana and the big brass sound of Mardi Gras to the heights of the Empire State Building. Turning the tradition of the southern gothic novel on its head, Woods presents a new land of contemporary misfits including fire-dancers, pseudo-Nazis who breed albino animals, Catholic workers, horse thieves, and the archangel Gabrielle.

“Everything is written beautifully, and there's nothing hiding the cruelty. It makes for an uncomfortable read.”—Ariel Speedwagon,Velvet Park

Devoid of pretense or fear, Woods tells a not so “normal” coming-of-age story set in the stretched-out underbelly of rural America. Smart but unworldly, Woods creates a new world for the contemporary misfit where circus performers, Catholic workers, fire jugglers, and power wives sit at the same table. A “gooble gobble” successor, Woods’s edgy sensuality doesn’t second-guess. Her language is clear, her home somewhere and nowhere.  —2013 Library Journal Spring Pick

A natural and philosophical writer, Woods is propelled by her commitments to language and desire to illuminate ghettos of consciousness: geographic, economic, and emotional.
—Sarah Schulman, author ofRat BohemiaandGentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

This book will grab you by the throat and not let up for 550 pages and when you’re finished you’ll wish you were back in its jaws. —Lambda Literary l3+