Deesha Philyaw‘s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, …
Reflecting decades of an extraordinary writing career, Ed Park’s new short story collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, offers a reading experience akin to entering the enchanted curio cabinet of his mind. To examine its contents is an exercise that proves fascinating, slightly puzzling, and always rewarding. If there are mismatched candlesticks found inside said …
There’s a moment near the beginning of “Ten Thousand Years,” the sixth story in Greg Schutz’s debut short story collection, Joyriders, where the sober protagonist Carter drinks cream soda on his back stoop as he watches “combines drag the fields, corn crackling in their combs.” The fields will return in a horrific moment at the …
There is a moment early in Are You Happy?, the title story from Lori Ostlund’s new collection, where Phil, the story’s protagonist, reflects on his decision not to bring his partner, Kelvin, with him to visit his dying mother. Because he has not explicitly told his family about Kelvin’s existence and not talked to them about …
In his debut short story collection, Guatemalan Rhapsody, Jared Lemus assembles dynamic slice-of-life stories about men and boys living in Guatemala and its diaspora, a perspective that enriches the growing canon of Latinx lit. With eight stories set in Guatemala and four in the United States, readers accompany unassuming characters as they scrape by in their …
Henry David Thoreau once said, “Not until we’re lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” This same sentiment speaks to the heart of Allegra Hyde’s short story collection, The Last Catastrophe, an assemblage of fifteen speculative stories that creatively consider the consequences of a not-too-distant future that at times feels so resonant and eerily familiar one …