*

for Tiny:
“The distant war turns us inside out as the imagination learns to reinvent violence and loss. In Tiny, Mairead Case doesn’t so much retell Antigone as perform a cover—different singer, different arrangement—on the theme of burying a brother. Vulnerability is a kind of sacrifice. Mourning makes us participate in death: ‘She wants to be told how to live in this body that now holds two dead people in it.’ Case has an uncanny ability to limn the emotion’s reasons and she is a scrupulous witness of the body, the ethics of freedom, and the particular ways that love connects us.” - Robert Glück

“In Tiny, Mairead Case crawls inside pain to open a door into the sky—only the stars may be able to provide a map for how to stay present in grief without always mourning. While permanent war forms the backdrop of this novel, intimate connection between friends, lovers, strangers, and accomplices offers a way to imagine survival in a world predicated on death. This is a book that expertly conjures the hopes of a teenage imagination not yet destroyed, searching for ways to express the intensity of every single emotion so that no one has to give up just in order to go on. Tiny offers a bouquet of feelings to expand the possibilities of this defiant dreaming that illuminates a shimmering pathway between night and day, a way to flail on the dance floor toward freedom, transforming everyday violation into collective joy.” - Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

“In a time of great and enduring grief, Tiny brings us ecstatic tenderness. Antigone is back, her queer heart adamant as ever in this extraordinarily fresh take on the classic Sophocles. More than any other writer, I trust Mairead Case to bury our dead and let the grief live as love, aching and tremulous and radiating in all directions.” - Megan Milks

“Until reading Tiny, I’ve never thought of light, and the way it colors, distorts, reflects, and refracts, as a setting and shape for a novel. Tiny’s interiority is a source of light because it illuminates the physical world, as well as her physical body. One of the qualities of light is soft edges, even for hard beams of light. The soft edges of memory, objects, people, grief, and life in this book makes me want to be in the world as light. Thank you, Mairead, for this tenderness in narrative, people, and place.” - Steven Dunn

“I love this novel. It is smart, sad, tender, ferocious, and so, so finely written. I’ve been a fan of Case’s work since See You in the Morning, and Tiny is further confirmation of her tremendous talent.” - Laird Hunt

"Case's Antigone has a Madmind, a Madheart. She is not preoccupied with legibility, because she knows, implicitly, that illegibility is the hole in which she finds her life –– even if that hole will also be her death. Antigone is a character who crosses worlds and refuses to comply with the rational, recognizing it for the prison it is. Case, with Tiny, walks us into the realm of Madness and impenetrable grief as a kind of politics, and unlocks this political potential in the unsuspecting medium of a hybrid-poetic text, in the unfathomable power that sits in the body of a young girl." - [sarah] Cavar

"This is the kind of grief narrative I want to see in the world—where loss isn’t something we move through, but a patient practice of unfolding, accepting, remaining, being with, being in-between, allowing, staying with. A disaster. A warp and weft. A web. The longest bus ride. Mairead Case’s writing is beautiful—spare, spacious, tender, full of grief and also so much joy. Oh, this book. What a gift." - Alissa Hattman

Conversation with Janice Lee at Volume 1 Brooklyn
Best Fiction Books 2020-2021 at Entropy
Book Notes, a playlist
Release Party at Pilsen Community Books, with Steven Dunn, Stephanie Acosta, and Rose & Pearl
Interview with Toby Carroll at Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Interview with Dana Bassett and Jesse Malmed for Bad at Sports
Interview with Teague Bohlen in Westword
Review by Evelyn Hampton in Rain Taxi
KGNU Book Club
SEMA Boise with CL Young (listen with care)

for See You In the Morning:
“This is not the mode of the stereotypical teenage diary, though; this is the mode of someone hoping that by taking in everything, everything will be revealed.” - Sara Veglahn

“A narrator so real you can feel their breath on the back of your neck as you read.” - Sarah McCarry

“This is a book that unfolds a fraught intimacy like a ‘pink ribbon’ then lays it on the grass for us to read, and maybe the writing is wavy because of it. And more real.” - Bhanu Kapil

Book Notes, a playlist
Interview with Toby Carroll at Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Interview with Adrienne Celt at Bookslut
100 Colorado Creatives
"This city's lit scene runs on Mairead's blood and sweat." - NewCity