Book picks similar to
The Weather Stations by Ryan Call


short-stories
fiction
short-story-collections
small-press

Tongue Party


Sarah Rose Etter - 2011
    It was selected by Deb Olin Unferth as the winner of the 2010 Caketrain Chapbook Competition and is currently available from Caketrain Press.

Short Dark Oracles


Sara Levine - 2011
    The manuscript was runner-up in the 2010 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Deb Olin Unferth.

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us


Laura van den Berg - 2009
    A grieving missionary becomes obsessed with a creature rumoured to live in the forests of the Congo. And, in the title story, a young woman travelling with her scientist mother in Madagascar confronts her burgeoning sexuality and her dream of becoming a long-distance swimmer.

Ghost Machine


Ben Mirov - 2010
    This debut full-length poetry collection by Ben Mirov was the winning manuscript in the 2009 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, as judged by Michael Burkard.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls


Alissa Nutting - 2010
    One is the main course of dinner, another the porn star contracted to copulate in space for a reality TV show. They become futuristic ant farms, get knocked up by the star high school quarterback and have secret abortions, use parakeets to reverse amputations, make love to garden gnomes, go into air conditioning ducts to confront their mother’s ghost, and do so in settings that range from Hell to the local white-supremacist bowling alley.

Partial List of People to Bleach


Gary Lutz - 2007
    A stunning collection of new and rare stories by Gary Lutz, the celebrated author of Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive.

Vampire Conditions


Brian Allen Carr - 2012
    Three cycles. Fists and possums and gunfighters and penises and hookers and short buses and dead babies and fireworks. The stories in this collection originally appeared in: HOBART, FICTION INTERNATIONAL, KITTY SNACKS, TEXAS OBSERVER, NEW BORDER and THE PURITAN.

Cities I've Never Lived In


Sara Majka - 2016
    At the center of the collection is a series of stories narrated by a young American woman in the wake of a divorce; wry and shy but never less than open to the world, she recalls the places and people she has been close to, the dreams she has pursued and those she has left unfulfilled. Interspersed with these intimate first-person stories are stand-alone pieces where the tight focus on the narrator's life gives way to closely observed accounts of the lives of others. A book about belonging, and how much of yourself to give up in the pursuit of that, Cities I've Never Lived In offers stories that reveal, with great sadness and great humor, the ways we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot be.Cities I've Never Lived In is the second book in Graywolf's collaboration with the literary magazine A Public Space.

Sorry Please Thank You


Charles Yu - 2012
    . . A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape . . . A company outsources grief for profit, their tagline: "Don't feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you."

May We Shed These Human Bodies


Amber Sparks - 2012
    ***Best Small Press Debut of 2012 -- The Atlantic Wire***May We Shed These Human Bodies peers through vast spaces and skies with the world's most powerful telescope to find humanity: wild and bright and hard as diamonds.

Look! Look! Feathers


Mike Young - 2010
    A town of spilled peaches fields its own game show. A mosquito fogger finds an unlikely friend. The stories in Mike Young's debut collection Look! Look! Feathers tap into the surreal and sad, the absurd and ragged dreams scratching at the edge of the American heart. Punks drive auctioned police cars, and necklaces of bluebird bones are sold from a roadside van. In these tales of the Pacific Northwest, Young finds magic burrowed under the moss of ordinary life.

Bed: Stories


Tao Lin - 2007
    An absurdist short story collection about the woes of 21st-century living--from an author whose writing is "moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious" (Miranda July)College students, recent graduates, and their parents work at Denny's, volunteer at a public library in suburban Florida, attend satanic ska/punk concerts, eat Chinese food with the homeless of New York City, and go to the same Japanese restaurant in Manhattan three times in two sleepless days, all while yearning constantly for love, a better kind of love, or something better than love, things which--much like the Loch Ness Monster--they know probably do not exist, but are rumored to exist and therefore "good enough."

Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry


Elizabeth McCracken - 1993
    Like her extraordinary novel, McCracken's stories are a delightful blend of eccentricity and romanticism. In the title story, a young man and his wife are intrigued and amused when a peculiar unknown aunt announces a surprise visit—only the old woman can't be traced on the family tree. In "What We Know About the Lost Aztec Children," the "normal" middle-class son of a former circus performer (the Armless Woman) must suddenly confront his mother's pain. In "It's Bad Luck to Die," a young woman discovers that her husband's loving creations—he's a tattoo artist—make her feel at home in her skin for the first time. Daring, offbeat, and utterly unforgettable, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry is the work of an unparalleled young storyteller who possesses a rare insight and unconventional wisdom far beyond her years. Her stories will steal your heart.It's bad luck to die --Some have entertained angels, unaware --Here's your hat what's your hurry --The bar of our recent unhappiness --Mercedes Kane --What we know about the lost Aztec children --June --Secretary of State --The goings-on of the world

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned


Wells Tower - 2009
    A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn’t match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl.In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before.

Understories


Tim Horvath - 2012
    Whether making offhand references to Mystery Science Theater, providing a new perspective on Heidegger’s philosophy and forays into Nazism, or following the imaginary travels of a library book, Horvath’s writing is as entertaining as it is thought provoking.