Margo Berdeshevsky

Margo Berdeshevsky's Kneel Said the Night weaves together intimacy, revamped fairy tales, erotic myths, and legends. Berdeshevsky articulates a composition that is balanced precariously between wonder and horror by merging poetry, prose, and visual art; the result is a fragmented world that offers a visceral, life-long journey of love and ruin. This collection explodes with relationships that are both passionate and complicated: a sick mother and her daughter, an unwanted child-turned-mother, a woman and her desires, a woman and her lovers, a woman and her predators, little boys and their predator. Oscillating between the real and the unreal, Kneel Said the Night renders pain and pleasure in equal parts with imagery that cuts deep yet embraces its reader, asking both "Who holds the winning hand?" and "Who will save us?"

Winner of FC2's American Book Review/Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize Margo Berdeshevsky's Beautiful Soon Enough is a collection of hypnotic stories that capture the lives - worldly, sexual, obsessive - of twenty-three arresting women.These are snapshots and collages: stories of women on the outside, looking in; of women content to end their affairs; of young women learning the power of seduction; and of older women reminiscing about past loves. They are women who cannot live without love's embrace, and women who have found it and feel that it is never enough. They are women of a 'certain age,' as the French might say, and women with naked hearts, of any age.Berdeshevsky's tales cross the planet: from beds in Paris to the roofs of Havana, from Venice Beach to the hills of Dubrovnik. With settings as varied as the characters they depict, these tales illuminate the lives of women desperate for a balance between love, comfort, and freedom. Personal, driven, and lyrical, together they are Beautiful Soon Enough.