From one of the most daring and sensuous young writers in America, Jesus Saves, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, is a suburban gothic that explores the sources of evil, confronts the dynamic shifts within theology, and traces the consequences of suburban alienation. Set in the modern launch pads of adolescent ritual, the strip malls and duplexes on the back side of suburbia, it's the story of two girls: Ginger, a troubled minister's daughter; and Sandy Patrick, who has been abducted from summer camp and now smiles from missing-child posters all over town. Layering the dreamscapes of Alice in Wonderland with the subculture of River's Edge, Darcey Steinke's Jesus Saves is an unforgettable passage through the depths of the literary imagination

Mary is a new mother transformed by the birth of her baby; Walter, a lonely gay Episcopal priest, privately struggles with his contradictory desires; and John, a monk who has left his monastery after fifteen years, craves intimacy with a woman. With mesmerizing prose, Darcey Steinke weaves together the lives of these three characters in ways that explore the intersection of spirituality and sexuality and reveal how even our rawest, most confused impulses may contain elements of the divine

When Jesse’s family moves to Roanoke, Virginia, in the summer of 1972, she’s 12 years old and already mindful of the schism between innocence and femininity, the gap between childhood and the adult world. Her father, a former pastor, cycles through spiritual disciplines as quickly as he cycles through jobs. Her mother is dissatisfied, glumly fetishizing the Kennedys and anyone else that symbolizes status and wealth. The residents of the Bent Tree housing development may not hold what Jesse is looking for, but they’re all she’s got. Her neighbor speaks of her married lover; her classmate playacts being a Bunny at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club; the boy she’s interested in fantasizes about moving to Hollywood and befriending David Soul. In the midst of it all, Jesse finds space to set up her room with her secret treasures: busts of Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, a Venus flytrap, her Cher 45s, and The Big Book of Burial Rites, which she reads obsessively. But outside awaits all the misleading sexual mores, muddled social customs, and confused spirituality. Girlhood has never been more fraught than in Jesse’s telling, its expectations threatening to turn at any point into delicious risk, or real danger

Vanity Fair called this intensely erotic story of a young woman's sexual and psychological odyssey "a provocative tour through the dark side." Jesse, a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old, is adrift in San Francisco's demimonde of sexually ambiguous, bourbon-drinking, drug-taking outsiders. While desperately trying to sustain a connection with her bisexual boyfriend in a world of confused and forbidden desire, she becomes the caretaker of and confidante to Madame Pig, a besotted, grotesque recluse. Jesse also falls into a dangerous relationship with Madison, Pig's daughter or lover or both, who uses others' desires for her own purposes, hurtling herself and Jesse beyond all boundaries. With Suicide Blonde, Darcey Steinke delves into themes of identity and time, as well as the common — and now tainted — language of sexuality

Darcey Steinke's first novel, now back in print, is an unusually assured and lyrical debut. Set on an island resort town off North Carolina, it tells of summer people and islanders, mothers and sons, women and men, love and its dangers. It is the story of Emily, a woman free as the waves she swims in every day, of the man who wants to clip her wings, of her son and the summer that he will become a man. George Garrett called it "clean-cut, lean-lined, quickly moving, and audacious. . [Steinke is] compassionate without sentimentality, romantic without false feelings, and clearly and extravagantly gifted." "Beautifully written. . a seamless and almost instinctive prose that often reads more like poetry than fiction." — Robert Olmstead, The New York Times Book Review; "Dazzling and charged. . Darcey Steinke has the sensuous and precise visions of female and male, and of the light and dark at the edge of the sea." — John Casey