Archives de catégorie : Short Stories

SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS de Leyna Krow

A darkly fabulist story collection about women’s choices, complicity, and power and the lack thereof (with screen rights to the title story « Sinkhole » sold to Jordan Peele and Universal).

SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS
by Leyna Krow
Viking, Summer 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

Credit: Young Kwak photo

From a genie, a devil, time travelers, a thief in peril, an oversized baby, an exploding woman, a woman with an impossible sinkhole in her yard, a woman who gives birth to a wild child, and more, this collection explores women in power – or in a deficit of power — to confront questions of complicity and intent, hysteria, paranoia, and what makes us whole in a world with relative values. With unsettling insight and echoes of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link and Laura van den Berg, SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS traces peripheral, upside down spaces in which sometimes there is a choice to be made, rules to be broken, risks to be tried, even crimes to be had, for the sake of a woman’s unconditional freedom.

Leyna Krow’s first collection I’M FINE, BUT YOU APPEAR TO BE SINKING (Featherproof Books, 2017) was a finalist for The Believer Book Award. Krow lives in Spokane, Washington with her husband and two children. She is at work on her second novel

COMPANY de Shannon Sanders

A richly detailed, brilliantly woven debut collection about the lives and lore of one Black family.

COMPANY: Stories
by Shannon Sanders
Graywolf Press, October 2023
(via DeFiore and Co.)

Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960s to the 2000s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, COMPANY tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.
Each piece in COMPANY includes a moment when a guest arrives at someone’s home. In « The Good, Good Men, » two brothers reunite to oust a « deadbeat » boyfriend from their mother’s house. In « The Everest Society, » the brothers’ sister anxiously prepares for a home visit from a social worker before adopting a child. In « Birds of Paradise, » their aunt, newly promoted to university provost, navigates a minefield of microaggressions at her own welcome party. And in the haunting title story, the provost’s sister finds her solitary life disrupted when her late sister’s daughter comes calling.
These are stories about intimacy, societal and familial obligations, and the ways inheritances shape our fates. Buoyant, somber, sharp, and affectionate, this collection announces a remarkable new voice in fiction.

Shannon Sanders lives and works near Washington, DC. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, Joyland, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and was a 2020 winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers

BUTTER de Gayl Jones

A wide-ranging collection, including two novellas and ten stories exploring complex identities, from the acclaimed author of Corregidora, The Healing, and Palmares.

BUTTER:
Novellas, Stories, and Fragments
by Gayl Jones
Beacon Press, April 2023

Gayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, “Butter” and “Sophia,” this collection features Jones’s legendary talents in a range of settings and styles, from the hyperrealist to the mystical, in intricate multipart stories, in more traditional forms, and even in short fragments.
Her narrators are women and men, Black, Brown, Indigenous; her settings are historical and contemporary, in South America, Mexico, and the US; her themes center on complex identities, unorthodox longings and aspirations. She writes about spies, photographers, playground designers, cartoonists, and baristas; about workers and revolutionaries, about environmentalism, feminism, poetry, film, and love, but above all about our multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial society.

Gayl Jones was born in Kentucky in 1949. She attended Connecticut College and Brown University, and has taught at Wellesley College and the University of Michigan. Her landmark books include Corregidora, Eva’s Man, The Healing (a National Book Award finalist and New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Palmares (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction), and most recently, The Birdcatcher (National Book Award finalist).

MUCKROSS ABBEY AND OTHER STORIES de Sabina Murray

From the PEN/Faulkner award winning pioneer of “ironic gothic” (Washington Post) comes a wry and spooky set of ghost stories, replete with original illustrations.

MUCKROSS ABBEY AND OTHER STORIES
by Sabina Murray
Grove Atlantic, March 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Since her acclaimed novel A Carnivore’s Inquiry, Sabina Murray has been celebrated for her mastery of the gothic. Now in MUCKROSS ABBEY AND OTHER STORIES, she returns to the genre, bringing readers to haunted sites from a West Sutralian convent school to the moors of England to the shores of Cape Cod in ten strange tales that are layered, meta, and unforgettable.
From a twisted recasting of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, to an actor who dies for his art only to haunt his mother’s house, to the titular “Muckross Abbey,” an Irish chieftain burial site cursed by the specter of a flesh-eating groom—in this collection Murray gives us painters, writers, historians, and nuns all confronting the otherworldly in fantastically creepy ways. With notes of Wharton and James, Stoker and Shelley, now drawn into the present, these macabre stories are sure to captivate and chill.

Sabina Murray is the author of the novels The Human Zoo, Forgery, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, Slow Burn, and Valiant Gentlemen, as well as two short story collections, the Pen/Faulkner Award winning The Caprices, and Tales of the New World. She grew up in Australia and the Philippines and is currently a member of the MFA faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, a UMass Research and Creativity Award, and a Fred R. Brown Literary Award from the University of Pittsburgh, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe, and a Michener Fellow at UT Austin. She is the writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and a Norwegian Amanda Award.

TELL ME A RIDDLE, REQUA I, AND OTHER WORKS de Tillie Olsen

“The four pieces in TELL ME A RIDDLE are lyrical bulletins of working-class family life, charged with emotional detail and delivered with an attention to the rhythms of consciousness more rigorous and powerful than most of what is called realism.” –A.O. Scott, New York Times

TELL ME A RIDDLE, REQUA I, AND OTHER WORKS
by Tillie Olsen
‎ University of Nebraska Press, 2013
(via the Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

A century after her birth, Tillie Olsen’s writing is as relevant as when it first appeared; indeed, the clarity and passion of her vision and style have, if anything, become even more striking over time. Collected here for the first time are several of Olsen’s nonfiction pieces about the 1930s, early journalism pieces, and short fiction, including the four beautifully crafted, highly celebrated stories originally published as TELL ME A RIDDLE: “I Stand Here Ironing,” “Hey Sailor, What Ship?,” “O Yes,” and “Tell Me a Riddle.” Also included, for the first time since it appeared in the 1971 Best American Short Stories, is “Requa I.”
In these stories, as in all of her work, Olsen set a new standard for the treatment of women and the poor and for the depiction of their lives and circumstances. In her hands, the hard truths about motherhood and marriage, domestic life, labor, and political conviction found expression in language of such poetic intensity and depth that their influence continues to be felt today.
An introduction by Olsen’s granddaughter, the poet Rebekah Edwards, and a foreword by her daughter Laurie Olsen provide a personal and generational context for the author’s work.

Tillie Olsen, 1912-2007, is internationally renowned for her powerful writing about the inner lives of working-class families, women, and minorities. Her books, Tell Me a Riddle, Yonnondio from the Thirties, Silences, and her essays and lectures, have been translated into twelve languages. In April 2021, A.O. Scott, the critic at large and co-chief film critic for The New York Times, wrote about Tillie Olsen for his essay series on influential American authors, saying she “helped change the study of American literature, opening its canon to neglected voices and traditions.”