Beth Couture - a marvelously strange concoction, a cocktail of super-realism, fantasy, surrealism, occultism, and pop art, Rosenquist style

Beth Couture,  Women Born with Fur: a Biography, Jaded Ibis Press, 2015.


“Where the magic of invention meets up with the heft of the human heart. That’s what has been delivered to us here in the form of this short novel. A memorable and singular debut. Women Born with Fur is its own language animal that brings speech to its own human heart.” –Peter Markus


“Never mind the author’s little hat trick of coming on with prose so unassuming, so disarmingly ‘Who, me?’ it hovers above the page, practically while whispering in your ear — just before turning on you with a bite that pierces the skin. So there’s that, yes, but still. I cannot think of another writer who could possibly tell this story with such sincerity and conviction and authenticity, no one. Then again, before reading Beth Couture’s Women Born With Fur, I never could have imagined that the hirsute could be so utterly heartbreaking.”–Courtney Eldridge


 “Beth Couture’s Women Born with Fur is a marvelously strange concoction, a cocktail of super-realism, fantasy, surrealism, occultism, and pop art, Rosenquist style. She develops her lovely conceit with care and kindness, leading us into a heartbreaking world we’ve never imagined, but in which we feel strangely comforted and right at home. An intoxicating book and brew.”–Frederick Barthelme


“You have never read anything like Beth Couture’s Women Born with Fur, because the writing is utterly reinventing what we mean when we say fiction or novella with sly and brilliant misdirections, tricks of the eye and ear and heart, glorious lies and precise fabrications. I had to read the whole thing without stopping. I nearly put it in my mouth.”–Lidia Yuknavitch