"In "Mannequin and Wife," the debut fiction collection from Jen Fawkes, readers will encounter a taxidermist with anger issues, an Elephant Girl, the strongest woman alive, a flock of stenographers, a fairy on her lunch break, and a married couple who cohabitate with a department store mannequin. Fawkes's sharp and imaginatively wonderful tales trip seamlessly across borderlands, navigating comedy and tragedy, psychological and magical realism, the mundane and the marvelous. An American actor impersonates a code-breaking Britisher during World War II. A mother awaiting her son's return begins to fear that her boy has been eaten. A criminal mastermind's protǧ ̌plots the destruction of Mount Rushmore from within a volcano. A man buys a drive-in theatre and transforms it into a carnival sideshow. An attorney puzzles over how to leave someone his deceased client's heart. These award-winning stories thrust fundamental human relationships-mother and child, husband and wife, mentor and protǧ,̌ sibling and sibling-beneath the lens of a provocative microscope. Mannequin and Wife teases out the startling complications that arise from our entanglements with those we love and those we hate, showing that they are one and the same"--