Soft Split is a dark tale about love, betrayal, dreaming, sex, airports, and office tension.
“With its red parrots, illicit sexual encounters, and a former lover named Blondie, Szilvia Molnar’s Soft Split is a welcome contribution to the library of dreams, wet and not.”
—Sjón, author of The Blue Fox
“If Georges Bataille had found a feral child and left her with Miranda July and Emmanuel Carrère to raise, the little girl may have grown up to sound exactly like Szilvia Molnar, whose Soft Split has the mannered depravity and whimsical uber-feminist pervdom we’ve come to expect from these giants of the genre.“
—Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
“Soft Split is loud & cheeky, relentlessly emotional, without a will to sentimentalize, what a generous bluntness in words & context, what a vulnerable I in every circumstance.“
—Saša Stanišić, author of Before the Feast
“Filthy, gorgeous, funny, strange—a dark little journey through someone else’s dream.”
—Jonathan Lee, author of The Great Mistake
A part of the Scout Books Series by Future Tense Books
Cover designed by Bryan Coffelt with art by Melody Owen
September 2015
32 Pages
Dennis Cooper throws a loving glance at Soft Split
"Soft Split is physically tiny—about 2.5 x 3.5 inches—which shouldn't matter, but it does, because it's too small for a bag and will end up in your pocket, and you'll forget it's there, and when you remember it you'll be shot through with an illicit thrill, like when you first started buying condoms and just looking at them made you feel embarrassed and excited. You'll end up reading it in public, waiting for clothes to dry at the laundromat or riding on the train, and when the buzzer announces the end of the cycle, when the train slides to a stop you'll look up, blushing, at the non-profane around you. Ostensibly about an ambivalent woman in an early marriage, the text consists of fragments of moments ranging from domestic and banal to startlingly obscene. It's incredibly engrossing even while exploiting conventional taboos and is at once beautiful and nasty."
—Faith Hale, SPD Staff Picks 2016
"Soft Split is a slick percussive gem of a story: funny, dirty, feral, full of sex and death and masturbation and bad behavior and ladies just trying to get what’s theirs.”
From Sarah McCarry’s The Rejectionist interview
“I read Soft Split sitting in a wooden chair in the corner of my living room with my leg muscles tensed, my mouth watering.”
From Meredith Alling’s Luna Luna Magazine interview
Your soft love
