UC San Diego

On the verge of the Great Recession, Vlora Sulejmani––an isolated, jobless, and frustrated young Albanian-American woman who spends most of her time with her grandmother in Climbing Rose Nursing Home and Eldercare, Assisted Living Suites Attached––is struck unexpectedly by stigmata. After a YouTube video of Vlora’s bloody experience goes viral, she finds herself caught between a developing American religious movement and her grandmother’s unspoken past. The novel uses experimental techniques to explore the dissociative postcolonial experience, and argues that imperialism, homophobia, and Christian hegemony are, like, pretty bad for you, actually.