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Box Girls by
Aria Braswell
For nearly twenty years, the events behind the Strasbourg hotel’s closure has remained a mystery known only by the few who frequent the back alleys of Hollywood Boulevard. There are whispers there, of girls in glass boxes, legendary art installations wiped from the record, after one of the performers was found dead in her box. The Box Girls are a myth or a memory that only few can recall, until now. From the detritus, a transcript emerges, and with it, an intimate narrative, the definitive record of what really happened that summer to the Box Girls of the Strasbourg Hotel. Over one hundred and twenty-eight interviews, and hundreds of hours of recordings, a frenzied tapestry of voices reveals answers to the mystery few knew existed, and explores visibility, identity, and the boundaries of perception in a world teetering on the brink of collapse.
“The chorus of voices in Aria Braswell’s stunning Box Girls is by turns mesmerizing, heartbreaking, and creepy as hell.”
— Lauren Grodstein, New York times best-selling author of A Friend of the Family
“Box Girls is a lyrical tale that unfurls in a series of captivating blinks, a heady cocktail of mystery and metaphysics.”
— Christopher J. Yates, award winning author of Black Chalk
“Box Girls is claustrophobic, joyful, spectral, and perversely liberating: we only hear their stories because of their boxes. Page by page, box by box, you crawl inside with them …”
-Jeremy Tenenbaum, Sortes Magazine
Aria Braswell is a native Texan set loose in New York City and writer of the weird and wild.
Her forthcoming debut novel, Box Girls, is to be published on April 23, 2025 with LIMIT ZERO Publications, and distributed by University of Hell Press.
Her humor and short fiction has appeared both online and in print in McSweeney’s, The Belladonna Comedy, Five on the Fifth, Sortes, Dark Recesses Press, Dark Lanes and elsewhere.
With a prolific background in the performing arts, Aria has worked on Broadway and across the United States as an actor, teacher, director and composer. She is on the editorial team for Sortes Magazine, a surrealist fiction publication, based out of Philadelphia.
She is a graduate of the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.