Perfect for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Kelly Link, Jo Paquette’s Stories I Told My Dead Lover contains eight searing tales of psychological horror that probe the darkest and most deeply buried parts of the human psyche. A child is forced to grow up too soon. A woman trusts her doctor too much. An abandoned woman […]
Author: Farhana
Plant-based skyscrapers, reluctant sex robots, pencil-wielding black-belts fighting a zombie apocalypse… Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Adam Marek’s third collection: an almanac of the absurd, a handbook to the hardware problems of being human. From driverless bodies, to life-coaching AIs, to sleep research on primates, to the effects of time dilation on married life… […]
Day 18: Beautiful Days ~ Zach Williams
Deeply uncanny and hauntingly resonant – strange stories about modern America, for fans of George Saunders, Mariana Enriquez and Shirley Jackson ‘One of 2024’s superlative debuts – this writer’s got talent to burn’ Washington Post‘These stories will change you’ Jonathan Safran Foer A young family is trapped in a time loop in an idyllic holiday cabin. A […]
Day 17: Wild Failure ~ Zoe Whittall
In Wild Failure, characters encounter feelings of shame, desire, attachment, and disconnection as they find themselves navigating their way through bad decisions, unusual situations, and fraught relationships. In “Oh, El,” a dominant woman can’t stop herself from toying with the tender heart of her co-worker. The title story, “Wild Failure,” is a doomed love story between an […]
Day 16: You Are the Snake ~ Juliet Escoria
From the celebrated author of Juliet the Maniac comes a collection of previously unpublished stories concerned with girlhood, family, and urge, reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Laura van den Berg In You Are the Snake, we peer into the life of a community college student, the life of an abusive grandmother is imagined, and a young woman takes […]
Day 15: Mrs Pulaska ~ Christopher Burns
With this new collection the acclaimed novelist Christopher Burns proves his mastery of the short story form. His intelligent but conflicted characters face their decisive moments across wide ranges of time and place, each action reshaping their futures and redefining their pasts. Interplaying with these choices are locations that underpin and define each story, such […]
Day 14: Mouth ~ Puloma Ghosh
In this debut collection, Puloma Ghosh spins tales of creatures and gore to explore grief, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. Embracing the bizarre and absurd, Mouth stretches reality to reach for truth. “Desiccation” follows a teen figure skater with necrophiliac fantasies who is convinced the other Indian girl at the rink is a vampire. When a […]
Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry―Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning author Ananda Lima. At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes him stories about beautiful and impossible things. Craft: […]
Day 12: Convergence Problems ~ Wole Talabi
Convergence Problems is a new short story collection from award-winning, Nebula-nominated Nigerian author Wole Talabi. Containing brand-new stories rewrites of early work, and a few previously published pieces, Wole Talabi’s new collection, Convergence Problems, consists of sixteen short stories and one previously unseen novella. All of the stories in this collection are set in or […]
Day 11: Best American Short Stories
A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, author of Matrix and The Vaster Wilds, and series editor Heidi Pitlor. “There have never been as many exquisitely built stories in existence than there are now,” proclaims guest editor Lauren Groff in her introduction. This abundance led to a volume of robust […]