Spokane Prize for Short Fiction
Spatfall
by Abby Lipscomb
Published: 2023
Price: $21.95
There are many wild souls worth meeting in Spatfall. Here resides a boy who kills a rattlesnake he cannot tame and cherishes its bones in an old cookie tin. another preserves his pet praying mantises by painting their fresh corpses. A senescent mother finds solace in her petulant cat as she grapples with their parallel decline, and another’s life begins to splinter under the imposing weight of a trespassing bear. Abby Lipscomb composes a landscape of brilliant brutality in this collection of stories where flawed humans find both truth and tragedy on the edge of the natural world.
Resurrection City
by Catherine Browder
Published: 2022
Price: $21.95
Resurrection City is a captivation collection of stories inspired by the 2011 triple disaster that devasted northeastern Japan. Bowder takes the reader on a journey through the communities rocked by each facet of the disaster–the earthquake, the tsunami, and the nuclear meltdown that followed. Bowder’s stories provide a deeply human perspective on a disaster whose impact was often relayed in the form of statistics, soundbites, and clips. The reader is reminded that no matter the magnitude of a disaster real human stories of heartbreak, resilience, survival, and love exist and must be told if communities impacted by such tragedies are to heal.
Catherine Browder is the author of three previous story collections, a feuillet, a Ploughshares Solo, as well as numerous produced plays. She’s taught ESL in Japan, Taiwan, and the United States, as well as creative writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she was also an advisory editor at New Letters magazine. Her first novel The Manning Girl won the Petrichor Prize from Regal House Publishing and is forthcoming in late 2023.
Sustainable Living
by Elsa Nikola
Published: 2022
Price: $21.95
In Sustainable Living, the backwoods and small towns of the Upper Midwest are places not to run from, but to return, to seek refuge, and to discover unsettling truths.
In “Meat Raffle,” a woman returns to the carp fishing village where she grew up, only to discover that her widowed mother has found happiness with a decades-younger man. In the aftermath of trauma, “Oktoberfest” finds a teenage girl caught between domestic duties and the pull of the natural world. In “White Birch Winter,” an aimless woman becomes a caretaker for her mother’s elderly ex-husband, an artistic recluse who is resistant to her efforts.
The women in these stories are tied to the land they inhabit, coming of age on rivers and lakes, among hunters and fishermen, dependent on tourist economies to make a living. Their desires are stifled by harsh climates, poverty, and difficult family relationships; what unites these characters is their quest to sustain themselves and a longing for connection-sometimes found in unexpected people and places.
Bosses of Light and Sound
by Nickalus Rupert
Published: 2020
Price: $19.95
Two movie-theater projectionists become addicted to “fixing” blockbuster films. An aged woman claims squatter’s rights at a Congo-themed mini-golf park. An eleven-toed breakfast food designer tries to save a doomed relationship by attempting a foolish stunt. Nickalus Rupert’s stories unearth humor and tenderness within the most trying aspects of being human. Bosses of Light and Sound will make you uncomfortable in the best way as characters struggle to negotiate circumstances that range from ridiculous, to excruciating, to improbably sublime.Two movie-theater projectionists become addicted to “fixing” blockbuster films. An aged woman claims squatter’s rights at a Congo-themed mini-golf park. An eleven-toed breakfast food designer tries to save a doomed relationship by attempting a foolish stunt. Nickalus Rupert’s stories unearth humor and tenderness within the most trying aspects of being human. Bosses of Light and Sound will make you uncomfortable in the best way as characters struggle to negotiate circumstances that range from ridiculous, to excruciating, to improbably sublime.
Nikalus Rupert is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer who spent most of his life near the Gulf Coast. This short story collection, Bosses of Light and Sound, was selected by Kevin Canty as winner of the 2019 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. His stories have appeared in or are forthcoming in The Idaho Review, Harpur Palate, Witness, The Literary Review, Pleiades, Tin House Online, and many other journals. Nickalus is represented by Akin Akinwumi at Willenfield Literary Agency, and is currently working on a novel. Find him at www.nickrupert.com.
things we’ll need for the coming difficulties
by Valerie Vogrin
Published: 2020
Price: $19.95
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Ventriloquisms
by Jaclyn Watterson
Published: 2017
Price: $19.95
Secretion, excretion, severed limbs, lost animals, and porcelain teeth. In these twenty-four radical works of female (dis)embodiment and creation—cries from the dark filtered through the fitful voices of a ventriloquist’s doll—Watterson invites readers to explore a defamiliarized world that is only as horrifying as our own.
Jaclyn Watterson is left-handed, vegetarian, and of choleric temperament. She gardens in fair weather on a small balcony and makes her home with the novelist Michael Shou-Yung Shum and several feline companions. Originally from Connecticut, she holds an MFA from Oregon State University and a PhD from the University of Utah.
Suffering Fools
by Glori Simmons
Published: 2017
Price: $19.95
A Woman running a halfway house for paroled sexual predators is left wondering if her favorite has committed his most unthinkable crime yet. A groundskeeper, who has just discovered that his ex is pregnant, digs up an infant’s tombstone inscribed with his own name. A traumatic traffic collision sends an aging couple back into their decades-long marriage. Whether it be a dying man spying on two teenage lovers, or a new mother running from her colicky infant, the nine stories in Suffering Fools spring from the dark corners of our psyches, revealing the fears and contradictions that five shape to unconditional love.
Glori Simmons is the author of Graft, poems (Truman State University Press), and a former Stegner Fellow in fiction. She currently lives in Oakland, California and is the director of the Thatcher Gallery at the University of San Francisco.
A Kind of Solitude
by Dariel Saurez
Published: 2016
Price: $19.95
Set in Cuba largely after the fall of the Soviet Union, these eleven stories explore themes of isolation and perseverance in the face of widespread poverty and socio-political oppression. From a chronically ill santero refusing medical care to a female-fronted heavy metal band risking it all to emerge from Havana’s rock underground, Dariel Suarez, in his striking debut, portrays the harsh reality, inherent humor, and resilient heart of a people whose stories should be known.
Dariel Suarez was born in Havana, Cuba and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1997, during the island’s economic crisis known as The Special Period. He is one of City of Boston’s inaugural Artist Fellows and the Director of Core Programs and Faculty at GrubStreet. His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Third Coast, among others. Dariel holds an MFA in Fiction from Boston University and currently resides in the Boston area with his wife and daughter.
All the Wrong Places
by Molly Giles
Published: 2016
Price: $19.95
Molly Giles’ nineteen strange, tightly woven tales merge the mythic and the modern with dark humor and deep humanity. Many of the stories contain contemporary versions of ancient guides: a ghost dog seen by a young drifter in love with a much older guru; a wild goat on a cliff forever standing beside her dead ram glimpsed by a woman whose husband battles cancer; a volcano goddess with a small dog appearing to a woman whose boyfriend is flirting with her teenage daughter. The vacationland settings, Hawaii, Ireland, Baja and California among them, accentuate the characters’ sense of displacement.
Molly Giles is the author of three award winning story collections, Rough Translations, Creek Walk, and Bothered, and a novel, Iron Shoes. Previous awards include the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Small Press Short Fiction Award, the Boston Globe Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and an NEA grant.
The Empty House
by Nathan Oates
Published: 2013
Price: $19.95
From the Northern wilderness of Alaska to the mountains of Guatemala, from rural Ireland to war-torn Haiti and beyond, the characters in these award-winning stories travel with dreams of escape but find themselves ensnared by cultural misunderstandings, political strife, and the weight of family: a professor heads to Ireland with his wife and children, hoping to mend his broken marriage; a father and son find themselves caught up in a near civil war in Haiti; a young man travels to Guatemala, trying to understand what happened to his brother who disappeared there years before. These characters walk a fine line between safety and danger, good and evil, life and death, on their way to find their truest selves revealed.
Nathan Oates received his Ph. D. in English and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri and has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prize awards. He has been published in the Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Fugue, among others. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and two children, where he works as an assistant professor of English at Seton Hall University.
John Keeble Series of Rural American Writing
Nothing is Precious
by Stefani Farris
Published: 2024
Price: $21.95
Stefani Jaye Farris’ new collection of stories presents a singular view of rural America, of broken-down towns not far from the cruel indifference of nature. Through the cloudy window of a backyard pottery studio, a woman barely older than her partner’s son wonders where he goes at night. A curious girl learns to escape the volatility of her family by entering the dazzling worlds on her microscope slides. A writer finds darkness in the person she loves when she goes with him to study the symbiotic link between wolves and ravens.
Special Releases
Swimming in Hong Kong
by Stephanie Han
Published: 2015
Price: $19.95
Stephanie Han’s award-winning stories cross the borders and boundaries of Hong Kong, Korea, and the United States. This is an intimate look at those who dare to explore the geography of hope and love, struggle with dreams of longing and home, and wander in the myths of memory and desire.
Stephanie Han’s Swimming in Hong Kong was the finalist for the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction as well as the Spokane Prize. She is City University of Hong Kong’s first English literature PhD. She lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, home of her family since 1904.
