Mother Simorq—equal parts witness, healer, and wise woman—offers a visionary alternative for women who transcend painful histories. Azadeh Azad’s "Thus Speaks Mother Simorq" gives voice to a mythological Persian bird woman. In... Read More

The experiences and disquieting realizations of black women come through "Training School for Negro Girls", in which Washington, DC, and its surroundings are treated with tension and tenderness. Spanning girlhood to adulthood, these... Read More

Delving into fractured families, hoarded secrets, and the cultural and personal negotiations at the heart of the Asian American experience, May-lee Chai’s "Useful Phrases for Immigrants" is distinguished by writing as elegant and... Read More

Micah Perks’s "True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape" contains plot twists inside of plot twists. Interconnected short stories reveal how characters’ inner battles to find love and to be loved create a world of conflict,... Read More

Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s stories are brooding, precise, and painful indictments of patriarchal cultures. They primarily follow women of color through harsh personal and postcolonial landscapes. Characters navigate the expectations and... Read More

Teresa Solana’s short story collection The First Prehistoric Serial Killer is darkly amusing and always entertaining. Its depictions of various criminal schemes and instances of murder range from realistic to fantastical. All of the... Read More

Kimberly Lojewski’s short stories meld the ordinary and the fantastical with a dark, melancholic edge. The collection is often delightfully subversive. Written as modern fairy tales, most of the stories center on a female protagonist;... Read More

Mournful and animate, Yenta Mash’s stories ingather Romanian shtetl lives before, during, and after Soviet disruptions. Each story is a microcosm of the Jewish diaspora: “as long as they bother to go after us, we can be sure we still... Read More