"Charlie J. Stephens is a bard of the Oregon coast, the Willamette River, the people left behind and the people doing the leaving, the transplants to the city's edges, the birds and deer and trees, the broken link between human and humane. This is a book about queer solitude and dreaming, the potential of friendship, the persistence of childhood longing, and what it means to grow. Each story stands on its own, while together they build up to a crescendo of conflicting feelings, 'the momentum underneath everything.'" -Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl

"Charlie Stephens's people are precisely the people we need right now-complex, compassionate, queer, courageous, and just a little bit sick of the way people focus on what is entirely beside the point. They have what the wise old woman who raised me would have called gumption. I would follow this writer into any dark woods." -Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country

"These solid, beautiful stories break open like exquisite geodes. Populated by a spectrum of characters who find themselves in less-than-ideal situations and locations, Annihilation for Beginners shows us that beneath our rough exteriors, eroded by loss and longing, often lie hidden, tender interiors shaped by a desire to know ourselves and how we fit into the vast, unknowable world that surrounds us." -Evan P. Schneider, author of Rural Education

"Stephens's sensitivity to nature and the human condition is exactly what this world needs. These stories mesmerize and hold you, even when everything feels impossibly damp and socked in. You'll laugh, cry, and emerge remembering that it isn't so bad to be a human being-so full of hope and so full of wonder." -Erin Steele, author of Sunrise over Half-Built Houses: Love, Longing and Addiction in Suburbia