As If She Had a Say, the second story collection from Jennifer Fliss, uses an absurdist lens to showcase characters—predominantly women—plumbing their resources in the face of misogyny, abuse, and grief.
The twelve stories in Direct Sunlight, award-winning author Christine Sneed’s latest, are inspired by the memorable strangeness of everyday life. The characters in these topically diverse tales experience events that bring the terms of their day-to-day lives and their relationships into focus in a way hitherto foreign to them.
All Roads explores childhood trauma, addiction, and the reckless materialism of mainstream American culture. Set mostly in Chicago, the stories depict the idiosyncratic forms of refuge we take in a culture that demands our self-objectification.
The surreal and the familiar clash in these stories, to visceral effect. The collection is eerie, hilarious, moving, and down-to-earth, even as its characters defy the rules—sometimes in the ways we wish we could.
Written as a series of rogue web posts, Instagram essays, rejected Yelp reviews, and SmugMug streams-of-consciousness that merge confession with art criticism, Art Is Everything is the story of an artist whose world implodes—just as she has a breakthrough.
The glamour of Callbacks is vulgar and gimcrack, the humor crass and slapstick. The women on stage rebel against the male gaze and male domination in entertainment. Callbacks is inspired by the structure and tone of the serial sitcom format, with fragments of unresolved narrative, a focus on the ensemble, pattering dialogue, recurrence, fadeouts, and a denial of closure. The uncanny and carnivalesque create an entrancing tone that is parried by the tragic side of showbiz—the scrutiny of women aging in front of an audience, and the resulting fear of failure and obscurity that drives rivalry and family feuds.
A woman meets a man and falls in love. She is sixty, a writer and lifelong New Yorker raised by garmentos. She thought this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again. He is English, so who knows what he thinks. He is fifty-six, a professor now living in Arizona, the son of a bespoke tailor. As the first of Laurie Stone’s linked stories begins, the writer contemplates what life would be like in the desert with the professor. As we learn how she became the person she is, we also come to know the artists and politics of the downtown scene of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, a cultural milieu that remains alive in her. In sharply etched prose, Stone presents a woman constantly seduced by strangers, language, the streets— even a wildlife trail. Her characters realize that they feel at home in dislocation—in always living in two places at the...
