About
Leslie Kirk Campbell’s debut short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs, won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. The collection is a 2022 Women’s National Book Association Great Group Reads Selection, a finalist for American Book Fest's 2022 Best Book Awards for Short Story, and a 2022 Foreword INDIES finalist in short fiction. Her award-winning stories have appeared in Arts & Letters, Briar Cliff Review, Southern Indiana Review and The Thomas Wolfe Review. She is the author of Journey into Motherhood: Writing Your Way to Self-Discovery (Riverhead, 1996), has published feature personal essays in San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and received writing fellowships at Playa and Ucross. Campbell is currently working on a second story collection, Free Radicals. She teaches at Ripe Fruit Writing, a creative writing program she founded in San Francisco in 1991.
Featured Work
The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs
![The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs](https://go.authorsguild.org/rails/active_storage/blobs/redirect/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBBMlVRQkE9PSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==--4a5bf5349eb766e37daa2f16bd67540ad0e0b6a4/BOOK-COVER-The-Man-With-8-Pairs-of-Legs1.jpg)
THE MAN WITH EIGHT PAIRS OF LEGS (Sarabande Books, 2022), winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction, is a collection of eight short stories. At its core, the book is about body-memory, the way we hold our pasts on our skin, visibly – bruises, scars, tracks, tattoos – and invisibly, over generations. Three of the eight stories focus on women's bodies, and the violation of women's bodies; in a fourth, "Triptych," we go back to the early 80s and the AIDS epidemic in a story about an artist/single mother and her dying neighbor; in a fifth, "Tasmanians," an Armenian-American woman tries to separate from the suffering she has inherited from her father and grandmother as well as a slew of relatives she has never known.
About this latter story, author Anthony Doerr wrote: "Tasmanians, shows better than any story I’ve read in a long time how genocide can ripple through time and haunt generations who did not live through it." About "Triptych," he wrote: "What a generous, complicated and big-hearted story. It is a story that means something, that increases empathy in the world…innovative and beautifully written…the writing is lovely and strange in all the right ways."
Other Works
-
Journey into Motherhood: Writing Your Way to Self-Discovery
Riverhead Books, 1996