Shut Up/Look Pretty is an anthology featuring Lauren Becker, Erin Fitzgerald, Kirsty Logan, Michelle Reale and Amber Sparks. The paperback version of this book is sold out! The E-book is still available both here and on Amazon.com.

EBOOK

Things About Me and You, a collection from Lauren Becker, is about a mailman who buries the mail, young girls with more bravado than self-awareness, a wrong daughter in a right family, uneven relationships, and beginnings and ends of friendships. These seemingly quiet stories will shatter your heart into a million little pieces but they’ll also pull the muscle of your heart back together because these are stories about connection, the desire to reach for something, for someone, – connection’s constant presence, its absence, and the inevitability of both.

Table of Contents

A Simple Explanation
I Am Very Lucky
His Days
The Apple Dress
A Boy
Independent Living
Follow
Things About Me and You
You Should Know
Rituals
The Hamburger Story
Outlaw Stories
The Word
There Was Nothing We Could Do
Erase
Plastic Coup de Grace
First
We All Fall Down
Five Ways
Laughter

Erin Fitzgerald’s This Morning Will Be Different features sixteen subtle, elegant stories about ordinary people—a car salesman, a high school senior, a failed dictator, a ghost, an army of undead, a Rapture-ready televangelist, a hoarder, an identity thief, a dead elf, several frustrated suburban parents, and Lindsay Lohan or, everything you wanted to be when you grow up—in extraordinary moments.

Table of Contents

After Prom, It’s All Downhill
Rethink
Early Decision
There Are Always children
Joy
Waiting Room
Trumpet Voluntary
Where Did It All Go Wrong?
At Grayfield Keep
Fed Up in Phoenix
This Morning Will Be Different
End Times
Promenade
Capacity
Fraud
Booking Number 2409756

Kirsty Logan’s novella, Local God, is a sort-of love story about four boys in a terrible punk band at Stirling University. Local God has a bit of queer lust, a bit of sex and a lot of swearing.

What Passes For Normal, by Michelle Reale, is filled with stories and prose poems that intimately explore the almost unbearable difficulty of being human. Whether here or elsewhere in the world, these characters feel the shaky ground beneath their feet , holding on to the world as best they can. Vulnerability, dysfunction and disappointment fill these stories, for sure, but hope, tenacity and defiance can be found in these words, too.

Table of Contents

Tunis
What Passes for Normal
Maternus
Folk
Honeymoon (First Story)
Local Custom (Second Story)
Bone in the Throat (Third Story)
People Nowadays
Market Day
Thaw
Practice
What a Culture War Might Look Like
Arbitration
What You Wish For
Mercy
Current
Girls With Barrettes
My New Boyfriend
Cinematic
Learn(ed)
Cumulative
Bocartes
We, the Women
Prime

The five unforgettable stories in Amber Sparks’s A Great Dark Sleep: Stories for the Next World  explore death and what follows. These stories are by turns gothic, sweet, funny, fanciful, tragic, playful, and even gruesome. Whatever the tone, whatever the tune, these stories are all written in the language of loss: that ancient tongue the dead have left their loved ones to make sense of.

Table of Contents

The Ghosts Eat More Air
The Stages of Human Decay
Coca-Cola Sponsors the Vampire Hunters
She Turned Her Husband into an Angel But Nothing Changed
For These Humans Who Cannot Fly