Bøger i Journal Non/Fiction Prize serien

"At its essence, this enjoyable collection explores how nothing is ever exactly as it seems."-Booklist"These ingenious stories are so funny and sparkling and slyly inventive that their pain catches you by surprise, like a sunburn after a day at the beach."-Eric PuchnerWinner, 2022 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Prize for Best FictionIn Becky Hagenston's fourth collection, the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. The characters are sex-toy sellers, internet trolls, parents, students, and babysitters-all trying to make sense of a world where nothing is quite what it appears to be. A service robot makes increasingly disturbing requests. A middle school teacher is accused of witchcraft-and realizes the accusations might be true. Two college students devise a way to avoid getting hit on in bars. A baker finds bizarre anomalies in his sourdough. A librarian follows her dead ex-husband through the Atlanta airport. In these stories, men and women confront grief, danger, loneliness, and sometimes-the strangest discovery of all-unexpected joy. Hagenston delivers a collection that is, at its weird and shining heart, about people discovering what-for better or worse-they are capable of.

A bull''s heart simmers in a crockpot, echoing the household''s tension in a retelling of Biblical Jacob''s trials. A priest observes his congregation''s descent into madness and wonders at his own role. An elderly woman imagines herself into her boomtown''s history and eventual abandonment at the height of the Gold Rush. Towns and people vanish, daughters return, women prepare escapes, and animals invade. In this collection of stories situated within the mythology of the Midwest, the past is always present, tangible and unrelenting, constantly asking these characters whether they will be a sacrifice or a martyr, daring them to give in without a fight. Here, transcendence is a tonic hard-earned by the battered soul.The atmospheric stories in When illuminate the customs of rural America, a part of this country that''s been asked to risk the best of itself in order to survive, revealing with humor and weight fears about wealth, worth, and the dignity of home.