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ABOUT TELL ME YOURS, I’LL TELL YOU MINE

A strange and sinister debut from Stephen Dixon Award-winning author Kristina Ten    

The new kid in school discovers a diabolical presence in the depths of an English-language-learning CD-ROM. A desperate and declining empire designs an elaborate matchmaking system around cootie catchers and soda-can tabs. A former varsity volleyball player reopens the grisly wounds of her youth, haunted by a lost friend. In each story, the game has been twisted. In each game, players must make their own rules. Through a bloody, shattered lens, the artifacts of growing up take on a new and disquieting power—riddles remain unsolved, pranks have perilous stakes, and superstitions won’t save you.  

Populated by living paper dolls, summer camp legends, and trivia nights gone terribly wrong, the twelve genre-crossing tales in Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine wrestle with themes of memory, disobedience, alienation, belonging, and the horrors of inhabiting a body others seek to control. 

PRAISE FOR TELL ME YOURS, I’LL TELL YOU MINE

“A joyous, incisive, inventive, and vital run of stories.” 
– Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter and My Heart Is a Chainsaw 

“Never have I ever tasted such a delicious cocktail of nostalgia and dread. Reading these stories feels like saying Bloody Mary into the mirror: in Kristina Ten’s expertly crafted world, your own reflection becomes a monster.” 
– GennaRose Nethercott, author of Thistlefoot and Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart 

“Kristina Ten's Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is an audacious debut, displaying a comfortable command across a variety of genres. These stories mix the creepy with the touching, the grotesque with the beautiful. My heart ached for some of these characters, pounded in fury for others. Ten is a writer to reckon with.” 
– Nathan Ballingrud, author of The Strange and Crypt of the Moon Spider 

“Imagine you're playing a game, one of the oldest and best-loved in your collection, a game you've always found completely pleasurable, completely absorbing. This time, though, midway through the first round, the rules seem to bend and turn inside out. You no longer recognize the board, you realize, and what's with these playing pieces? Where did they come from? Did you move that one just now and forget about it, or did it move itself? The game is still pleasurable, still absorbing, but unfamiliar suddenly, and slightly threatening. That's what reading Kristina Ten is like. Her stories are marvels, and page after page they found new ways to surprise and discomfit me.” 
– Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations  

“The stories of Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine delight in trickery. Its collective narrative⁣ voice is somehow one of comfort, of solace; it might even evoke feelings of nostalgia—if you⁣ were raised in The Twilight Zone.”⁣  
– Joe Vallese, editor of It Came from the Closet 

“In Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, Kristina Ten transports us back to the schoolyard . . . just not the way we remember it. Infused with horror and heartbreak, these stories play at the edges of realism, dip in and out of the fantastic, and showcase Ten’s incredible range as her characters navigate girlhood and womanhood, the immigrant experience, and the indelible marks that our histories leave on our futures. This collection delights from start to finish, each story a fresh take on our oldest fears.” 
– Gwen E. Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristina Ten’s stories appear in McSweeney's, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We're Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, Nightmare, Lightspeed, Uncanny, and elsewhere. She has won the McSweeney's Stephen Dixon Award for Short Fiction, the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award, and the F(r)iction Writing Contest, and was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Locus Award. Ten is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and the University of Colorado Boulder's MFA program in fiction, and was a 2024 Ragdale writer-in-residence. Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is her debut collection. 

For more news and press, check out her website.