The seventeen unrelenting stories in Steve Fox's debut story collection, Sometimes Creek, traverse a sub-zero trail of plausible magic and grit from a kaleidoscope of broken ice at a hockey rink in Wisconsin that coils through haunted rivers and around dangling legs of jamón serrano in sweltering Spanish bars and back again to a place where Kafka and Carver meet up on the page. Fox's clean prose takes you by the hand and weaves a tapestry of tenderness, dissonance, indifference, dystopia, and charm into that gauzy space that collectively takes shape in your hands as Sometimes Creek.
WINNER Fiction: Short Story 2023 International Book Awards
Sohrab Homi Fracis’s innovative new collection tells a spectrum of stories under a paradoxical new umbrella category: True Fiction. Monotony is banished from this book. At a Florida coffee shop, an immigrant’s voice opens up even as a hipster musician’s shuts down. An underpaid bank teller in the age of ATMs is fired and goes postal. In the title story, on whose premise the book pivots away from realism, a professor recalls his favorite communication ever—and it’s utterly silent. A loving husband and father finds himself inexplicably transformed into a woman. In another world, the protagonist simultaneously faces his end and a new beginning. A budding female messiah confronts a non-gendered godhead. And a bastard prince of ancient Turkey (whose legendary Persian name lives on in the author’s) invades Persia to seek his father. Yet we can see ourselves in them all. Even as the resident magician in Five Points Coffee & Spice regales his fellow customers, Fracis’s literary dexterity takes us on a darkly beguiling magic-carpet ride.
WINNER Short Story Fiction 2023 American Fiction Awards
Ghost House is a short story collection where the madwomen are out of the attic and roaming the streets of Chicago, New York City and Prague. This series of "modern feminist ghost stories" explores the line between magic and reality and all the ways women can be haunted, and redeemed.