Damn Love

“The characters in these linked stories navigate love and loss with a touching urgency that feels particularly American.”—People Magazine

“Whether she’s writing about gay or straight relationships, the dynamics of family ties or friendships, Beach-Ferrara’s exploration of the numerous types of love are spot-on in her debut short story collection.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Smart, painful, and impressive in its scope, Damn Love explores what happens when relationships implode and leave a person no choice but to move forward.”—Foreword Reviews

“The characters here range from personal success to perennial striver and several variations thereof, and they each look for love with a mix of patience and determination, waiting to see if it comes through in the end.”—Lambda Literary Review

Damn Love is much more than a collection of linked stories: it’s a collection of linked people, bound together in beautiful ordinary passion and rendered with exquisite generosity by a writer with a big, brave heart.”—Chris Adrian, author, The Great Night and The Children’s Hospital

“With remarkable authority, insight, and compassion, Jasmine Beach-Ferrara leads us through a web of intricately-related lives in stories that achieve what Eudora Welty said she set out to do: “not to point the finger in judgment, but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s human plight.” This is an extraordinary debut.”—Peter Turchi, author, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer As Cartographer

“Jasmine Beach-Ferrara’s linked stories will sneak up and steal your breath away with their clear and seemingly easy accumulation of grace. Damn Love is important for its delicate, honest portrayals of friends and relations, gay and straight, measuring the good, and trying to find acceptance in everyday American life.”—Tracy Winn, author, Mrs. Somebody Somebody

Set in San Francisco and North Carolina, the linked stories in Damn Love introduce us to characters struggling with love in all its complicated forms, including a young doctor getting over a breakup with the help of a patient, a newly married gay man who reconnects with his estranged mother, a trio of physicists caught in a surprising love triangle, and a soldier who takes secrets with her to the Iraqi desert. Together, these stories report out from the fault lines of American life, uncertain territory where identity, risk, and desire co-mingle, and where reconciliation can be found in even the most flawed efforts to connect.

A 2010 NEA Literature Fellow, Jasmine Beach-Ferrara received her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Crazyhorse, The Harvard Review and other publications. She is a minister in the United Church of Christ and the executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, which promotes LGBT rights in the south. She and her wife, Meghann, live in Asheville, NC