"Soul Retrieval": Debut Novel by Shanna McNair (Literary Fiction)

Literary Fiction: Novel, Forthcoming from High Frequency Press, 2025.

Mary Dixon comes to soul retrieval late, in mid-life. She has crosses to bear: her family history is steeped in mental illness and abuse, and she must navigate mires of addiction and legions of gnawing regrets to finally reclaim her self. Soul Retrieval begins in present-day, with the chapter “The Coming of the Ship” (an ode and homage to Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet). Mary is riding a train in France, on her way to a writing residency. She doesn’t speak the language and can’t find her seat. A conductor offers her a spot to sit in between railcars. As the French landscape rolls by, she pulls out a copy of The Prophet. She treasured the book as a youth and has not read it in decades. Page after page, she grows more and more transfixed by its profundity and beauty. She sees how her story inter-weaves with the greater story of humanity. She is flooded with hope, and at the same time feels shame for not knowing this sooner.

She has an epiphany: she is only as lost as she chooses to be. Tears of awe on her cheeks, she recalls and travels and traces the stories of her lifetime. Her intense yearning to become whole again opens the way. She begins to locate her forgotten voice, and edge toward her truth.

Two hardcover volumes:

Hardcover with dust jacket and printed laminate cover and 16 black-and-white art plates on cream paper, 264 pages, 9” x 6” $29.95 ISBN: 978-1-962931-02-1

Special edition hardcover with dust jacket and printed laminate cover and 16 full-color art plates on white paper, 232 pages, 10.8” x 8” $45.00 ISBN: 978-1-962931-45-8 (coming soon for pre-order)

The book is also available as an E-PUB. McNair’s original art pieces in Soul Retrieval will be available for purchase separately as reproduced art prints.

PRAISE FOR SOUL RETRIEVAL

On Soul Retrieval:

Shanna McNair is a writer of great astringency, intensity, and lucidity, but also one of deep feeling. She's perhaps a lapsed idealist, as Mary McCarthy said of one other, but in the best sense, in which the ideals still show plainly through. Her work catches me off guard, surprises, and therefore makes [short] fiction again powerful and raw.

On the chapter “Love” in Soul Retrieval, previously published as a standalone short story, “Funhouse”:

“Funhouse” is a truly moving and refractory account of love and self-destruction, is a story that bends back on itself about a half dozen times before the pages are through, forcing us to revisit our presumptions about the main character, Mary, over and over again, as she appears to get herself, or to have gotten herself, into worse and worse scrapes. I have to admit, I loath the Gary Wright song that “Funhouse” uses as its epigraph, but it’s a sign of the great wisdom that McNair brings to bear on this vulnerable, broken, longing protagonist who is her first-person narrator, that you don’t know at the end whether the character knows how murky and woebegone is her conception of love, and, further, whether we should think of this story as confessional, or the furthest thing from confessional that we might find in a contemporary realistic short fiction, a post-modern story of love, an anatomizing of poor choices, refraction of a story of love, a story that may have some actual appropriated non-story material in it, or, maybe not, maybe all those tape recorded voices are invented, a story of recursions and regrets and repetitions! A story with a really bad song as its epigraph on purpose!

The model for this elevated, poignant, lacerating, romanticist vision of human longing is the Denis Johnson of the early period, the guy who wrote Angels, and perhaps, via Denis Johnson, the Isaac Babel of Red Cavalry, where the very worst human tendencies are somehow the long slow way, the very costly way to God. You feel that in “Funhouse,” that all of the good times that were not good at all are such that a protagonist can manage one split second of saying “I’m sorry,” and really meaning it, and thus making good, at last, however briefly, redeemed at the last moment when redemption counts. I always sympathize with a character like this, with my whole heart, and evidently McNair does, too, because she couldn’t tell this much truth without sympathizing, which is probably why she’s such a good citizen, too. She has the really, really big heart.

—RICK MOODY, author of The Ice Storm and Hotels of North America

“Shanna McNair writes with power, grace, originality, and vulnerability about old truths in a new era. We know that the world is a hard and wonderful place; but in McNair‘s work, we do more than just know it. We feel it, with the intensity such a realization or remembrance deserves. I’m grateful for this novel.”

— RICK BASS, author of For a Little While and All the Land to Hold Us

“Shanna McNair writes with an assured mastery. The characters in this novel are richly drawn and nuanced, the story here is intriguing and deeply imagined, and completely unexpected in its turns. Elegant language, humor, and wit, draw us into her words. This novel is a captivating must-read.”

— CHRIS ABANI, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas and GraceLand

As I read Soul Retrieval it dawned on me that I have long been waiting for a novel in its particular vein: A voice-driven work of literary fiction weaving stories that echo my own stories, told from inner spaces of vulnerability that few of us dare acknowledge, much less inhabit. Herein lies perhaps the source of the book’s irreverent elixir, on the force of which it intrepidly expands the literary fiction genre into uncharted territories. The rhythm of McNair’s prose is as pronounced and musical as it is raw. The narrative voice evokes the radical awareness of an individual who is often too smart for her own good and riddled with flaws that she wears as humble marks of her humanity. Hers is a wayward voice finding its way back to itself, a woman’s voice with nothing left to lose, a wounded voice that is twisted and plied and battered until it bleeds heart-shredding images, a porous voice on the trail of healing and connection and love, channeling a mixed bag of cultural tonalities and an insatiable hunger for life. The stories told by this compelling voice throw caution to the winds in the exploration of emotionally complex subject matter, from abuse and mental illness to loss and addiction, weeping tears of joy as well as pain, and where one least expects it, trip-wiring stunning flashes of beauty.  

—DIANE OATLEY, author of Swoon and translator of The History of Bees

In Soul Retrieval, Shanna McNair gives us Mary Dixon, writer, artist, musician, hell-raiser, and indefatigable searcher. Haunted by family trauma and a sense of locational and spiritual displacement, Mary sets out on a journey of the soul that takes her from one end of the country to another, from childhood to the present, and from the miasma of self-loathing, addiction, and violence to a shaky but ever-brightening place of awareness and love. Combining the rat-a-tat wordplay and rhythms of Jack Kerouac with the bell-clear reflectiveness of Marguerite Duras, McNair’s inaugural book is the most original kind, one which pulls off the rarest of feats: presenting the retrieval of a shaken soul without pontification or bombast. A fierce, technicolor ride, brimming with calamity, sorrow, flashes of wild humor, and an overarching love for whom we meet and what we might become.

—ALEXANDRA OLIVER, Author of Hail, The Invisible Watchman and Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway

Soul Retrieval is forthcoming (June 26, 2025) from High Frequency Press.

Cover is ARC version; final cover may vary.