“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. ”

“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.”

“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. ”

“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.”

“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.”