The Good Eye

“The best first collection of stories I’ve read in years: witty, ironic, unnerving, stylish, and funny, very funny. The stories are wonderfully written but Gibson’s sensibility is what’s most striking. It’s like going for a walk with a charming and cultivated guide who knows her way around some of the most vivid parts of hell.”

“Astoundingly accomplished. Unsettling, forensically observed, and written in devastatingly pristine prose, these stories burrowed their way under my skin and lingered there. Jess Gibson does not write like a debut author. These are modern stories imbued with a sense of timelessness.”

“Wise, seductive, funny, and psychedelic, The Good Eye is written in gloriously precise and tactile prose, illuminating the antechambers and edges of life—apparitions, fakes, visitations by ghosts, rodents, and stray lovers—where both threat and insight glistens. Hopeful and renegade like Joy Williams and with a sly Mona Lisa smile, Jess Gibson moves between a high-altitude view and the very muscle of life to uncover what fluorescence it might hold. This collection took my breath away. A quietly, cumulatively, supernaturally brilliant debut.”

"The Good Eye is the kind of collection I'm always looking for and never seem to quite find. The power in these beautifully understated stories is in the concision—and precision—of the language. No gimmicks here, just direct, clear-eyed prose. And moving, human struggles on the page."

“The stories in this bewitching collection begin in the known world before tilting towards mystery and rebellion—a book full of pleasure and surprise.”

“Twelve smart, understated stories about uncanny and magical moments in everyday life… Often, the stories themselves perform surprising and original sleights of hand, starting with one character only to reveal that another is the real star…Well-mannered stories about women in the throes of rejecting convention and exercising all varieties of magic.”