Learning to Hit My Mother

A clear-eyed and necessary account of how violence insinuates itself into characters living liminal lives in the purgatorial world of Ontario, Illinois, Learning to Hit My Mother is a collection of connected stories that all possess a unity of place - and characters so compellingly human that they promise, with an almost unflappable certainty, to possess the reader. Pit, a girl at the onset, is savaged by her mother, who goes at her with her hands, heart, and even a baseball bat because her husb