Readings From Fiction

Chanelle Benz has published short stories in Guernica, Granta.com, Electric Literature, The American Reader, Fence, and The Cupboard, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her story collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead was published in 2017 by Ecco. It was named a Best Book of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle and one of Electric Literature’s 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2017. It was also longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. She teaches at Rhodes College in Memphis. The Gone Dead (Ecco) is her electrifying debut novel. Billie James' inheritance isn't much: a little money and a shack in the Mississippi Delta. The house once belonged to her father, a renowned black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old. Though Billie was there when the accident happened, she has no memory of that day—and she hasn't been back to the South since. Thirty years later, Billie returns but her father's home is unnervingly secluded. As Billie encounters the locals, she hears a strange rumor: that she herself went missing on the day her father died. As the mystery intensifies, she finds out that this forgotten piece of her past could put her in danger. Inventive, gritty, and openhearted, The Gone Dead is an astonishing debut novel about race, justice, and memory that lays bare the long-concealed wounds of a family and a country.

Juliet Grames was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in a tight-knit Italian-American family. A book editor, she has spent the last decade at Soho Press, where she is associate publisher and curator of the Soho Crime imprint. The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna (Ecco) is her first novel. In her rugged Italian village, Stella is considered an oddity—beautiful and smart, insolent and cold. Stella uses her peculiar toughness to protect her slower, plainer baby sister Tina from life’s harshest realities. But she also provokes the ire of her father Antonio: a man who demands subservience from women and whose greatest gift to his family is his absence. When the Fortunas emigrate to America on the cusp of World War II, Stella and Tina must come of age side-by-side in a hostile new world with strict expectations for each of them. Soon Stella learns that her survival is worthless without the one thing her family will deny her at any cost: her independence. Entertainment Weekly calls it, “Witty and deeply felt.”

Ruchika Tomar is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. In her debut novel, A Prayer for Travelers (Penguin Random House), Tomar explores the complicated legacy of the American West and the trauma of female experience. Cale Lambert, a bookish loner of mysterious parentage set adrift by the loss of the grandfather who raised her, and Penélope Reyes, a charismatic former classmate running mysterious side-hustles, reconnect after many years and become inseparable. In the process, Penny exposes Cale to the reality that exists beyond their small town. When Penny vanishes without a trace, Cale sets off on a dangerous quest across the desert to find her friend, and discover herself. R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries, called Tomar “an ace cartographer of the heart and its urgent, wild, unruly ways. Radiant with longing, A Prayer for Travelers is an unforgettable debut.”