A middle-aged, coming-of-age story for the lost and found. Quirky, funny, heart-wrenching, and hopeful. A perfect combination! I'm absolutely in love with Evangelina Everyday.

-J.R. Jamison

author of Hillbilly Queer

host of NPR's The Facing Project

Evangelina may be trapped in the dreary role of the everyday Midwest housewife, but she is no everyday character. Burns invites us to laugh-but ever so gently-at Evangelina's fantasies and experiences, whether she is praying most sincerely for a happy ending for Downton Abbey's Edith, wondering if supernumerary teeth are a monstrosity or a miracle, or watching with fascinated horror as cockroaches engage in sex. Burns is a master of offbeat stories, and Evangelina Everyday is dazzling in its balance of satiric fun and serious storytelling, underscoring the stifling safety of traditional women's roles and the vulnerability involved in accepting one's own socially disruptive desires.

-Mary Catherine Harper

author of Some Gods Don't Need Saints

Evangelina Everyday is a captivating portrait-so captivating that I read it in a single sitting. From the familiar comfort of her long marriage, Evangelina must decide whether to choose safety and security or courage and joy. In limpid, wry prose, Dawn Burns captures the smallest ripples in the placid domestic waters of Evangelina's conventional Midwestern life. By the time she imagines another way of being, her choices feel both inevitable and exhilarating.

-Valerie Sayers

author of The Powers and Brain Fever

Evangelina, the protagonist of Dawn Burns' captivating collection Evangelina Everyday, has a life at least as rich as Walter Mitty-but, while Mitty dreams of blockbuster adventures, Evangelina dreams of what feels to her like the boldest fantasy of all: getting to somehow be her full self. Burns renders this vivid inner world with compassion and a sharp eye for emotional detail. As a result, Evangelina Everyday is an invitation to hope-to hope that what is bound can become free.

-David Ebenbach

author of Miss Portland and How to Mars

With soaring visions of the undetected visions of an ordinary woman and a merciless eye for the surreal side of reality, Dawn Burns spins a tale that leaps from lyricism to bitter and back again. Mix poetic narrative with Burns' ability to explore everyday provocations exploding into unacceptable truths, and you'll have Evangelina Everyday.

-Randy Susan Meyers

bestselling author of Waisted

These epiphanic, tightly focused, sublimely rendered meditations are secular prayer proems that trace the elegantly ecstatic patterns captured on the flat glass of cloud chambers. These brief pieces are, everyone, another origin story in Evangelina's evolution. Every day is a different Homeric Hymn, and each day is greeted by a unique shade of rosy-fingered Dawn floating on the illuminated manuscript of the wine-dark sentences of seeing. Evangelina Everyday has the unerring accuracy of an atomic clock and an eye more open than the new Webb Space Telescope out there capturing the decayed infrared light of the billion-year-old Big Bang.

-Michael Martone

author of Plain Air: Sketches of Winesburg, Indiana