Juniper Prize for Fiction – serie

Showing both the drama of familial intimacy and the ups and downs of the everyday, My Old Faithful introduces readers to a close-knit Chinese family. These ten interconnected short stories, which take place in China and the United States over a thirty-year period, merge to paint a nuanced portrait of family life, full of pain, surprises, and subtle acts of courage. Richly textured narratives from the mother, the father, the son, and the daughters play out against the backdrop of China's social and economic change.With quiet humor and sharp insight into the ordinary, Yang Huang writes of a father who spanks his son out of love, a brother who betrays his sister, and a woman who returns to China after many years to find her country changed in ways both expected and startling.

A synchronized swimming coach pops pills during practice, a bagpiper cold-cocks a hawk, and an orphan puts her fist through a window, discovering in the engine noise of a jet passing overhead, the perfect witness to her inner pain. In this debut collection from prizewinning short story writer Malinda McCollum, people adrift in the American Midwest struggle to find their way in the world, with few signposts for guidance. Set largely in Des Moines, Iowa, over the expanse of several decades, these twelve stories explore the surprising places where our outsized longings may lead us. In prose as lean and unflinching as an Iowa winter, these stories offer confrontation and consolation in equal measure.

In astronomy, the termination shock is the boundary that marks the outer limits of the sun's influence - the ripple outward of our solar wind and its collision with the interstellar medium. This debut collection of stories evokes those moments when lives are unpredictably shaken and reset by forces beyond their grasp.Making use of a diverse array of narrative modes, settings, and voices, these stories traverse space and time, moving from Egypt during the Second World War to modern-day Liberia and an unfamiliar Los Angeles. The title story, ""Termination Shock,"" offers a lyrical exploration of two traumatic moments in a woman's life that occur decades apart and continue to reverberate in humorous and poignant ways. Janice Margolis shows us characters on the precipice of change - including a narrator in fevered quarantine following the death of her mother from Ebola, a cross-cultural love in a swiftly transforming Syria, and the desolation of the Berlin Wall, which from its various sectors and coordinates, confesses its crimes and mourns its destruction.

When Edward Tamlin disappears while writing his memoir, Jane Tamlin (his wife and the mother of his young children) begins to write a secret, corrective ""counter-memoir"" of her own. Calling the book Choke Box, she reveals intimate, often irreverent, details about her family and marriage, rejecting - and occasionally celebrating - her suspected role in her husband's disappearance.Choke Box isn't Jane's first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. But the stories we tell may help us survive - if they don't kill us first.

We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. -- Thomas JeffersonDuring the War of 1812, thousands of enslaved people from plantations across the Tidewater rallied to the British side, turning against an American republic that had barred them from the promises of freedom and democracy. Set against the backdrop of rebellion and war, Wayne Karlin's A Wolf by the Ears follows the interconnected stories of Towerhill and Sarai, two African slaves, and their master, Jacob Hallam. Educated side-by-side and inseparable as children, the three come of age as they are forced to grapple with -- and break free of -- the fraught linkage of black and white Americans and how differently each defines what it means to fight for freedom. Sarai and Jacob are caught in the tension between the dream of equality, the reality of slavery, and their own hearts, while Towerhill sits at the head of a company of black marines that is part of the force that takes Washington and watches the White House burn.

Exploring the darker side of optimism, Sarah Harris Wallman's debut collection shows women attempting to build durable havens from reality, struggling to keep relationships intact, and reinventing themselves. A lonely music teacher at a Nashville Christian academy awaits the miracle of love; a Jane Doe recalls the affair that sustained, and ended, her; a new mother brings life into the world during a bleak election party; young girls are exploited by a nightclub owner in death, as in life. Alone or in weird sisterhood, some of these women are senseless because they refuse to feel, others because they've been deprived of stimuli and attention. As these twelve stories prove, there's no sensible way to fall in love, raise children, or escape. This is Senseless Women.

An insurance lawyer driving across Iowa engages a wounded, hitchhiking priest in a metaphysical debate. A vacationing air traffic controller with a penchant for Saint Francis of Assisi is bitten by an ancient parrot. The Marxist owner of a Florida curiosity shop confronts a local church community's rising anger over a jarred fetus, while a fasting husband of an evangelical minister holds bloody communion with the leader of a suburban coyote pack and a Catholic cable news cameraman tracks a missing stigmatist through a Caribbean port city. As cosmic struggles play out against the backdrop of forgotten strip malls, suburban cul-de-sacs, and grimy cities, guidance comes from the unlikeliest of sources. In prose both dreamlike and vivid, the characters in Pete Duval's second collection navigate paths through a landscape of vestigial faith and nagging doubt.

Exploring the vagaries of life, human connection, and desire, the twelve stories of Safe Places navigate the fault lines of existence. Shifting from New York and Chicago to the American West and the Australian outback, Kerry Dolan's characters move through an uncertain and unpredictable world, confronting situations that are alternately menacing, tragic, and funny. An aspiring anthropologist falls under the sway of her fortuneteller. An American tourist catches opal fever in an Australian mining town and binds herself to a man she despises. Two hitchhiking teens take a ride with a mysterious stranger, while an unstable graduate student stalks the object of his affections across Berkeley. Assured and distinctive, the voice-driven stories of this debut collection capture the restless heart of characters in a state of flux, as they try—and frequently fail—to move beyond chance and circumstance.

Word spreads from one recovering self-inflicted eye surgery patient to the next of a mystical book capable of overturning the Burlingtonian empire.Captivating and devious, the book of webs is constructed out of misremembered fragments, conflicting histories, and secrets whispered in the darkness. The insurgents tell of an enemy so powerful it owns the air, dictates reality, and has even managed to co-opt their thoughts. Their only hope is to conspire with the uprisings of their bodies: slips of the tongue, excretions, tics, bad hair days, and, most importantly, their dreams.In this darkly comic and inventive debut novel, Jesse Kohn introduces a network of shape-shifters and misfits. A militant priestess broods over orphaned angel eggs. A post-punk band animates a messianic homunculus made of belly button lint. A failed dream journalist goes on a terrible first date to heaven. Each misadventure is a chapter in a book devised to oppose the despotic order of their enemy—the book of webs.

Some called her the Everywhen Woman. She claimed to be 321 years of age. In 2038, after the big storm and the great flood and the bad times, Betty Baach wrote these words down and sometimes spoke them aloud, at her homeplace on Freon Hill. She referred to them as songs. All stories are songs, she’d always say. Set in West Virginia, The Songs of Betty Baach is a magical guide to resisting despair and a compendium of wisdom and rhythms by which to fortify oneself. The lives of the Baaches of Keystone and the Knoxes of Mosestown twist and connect in a tale of survival and retribution that crosses three centuries—moving from Betty’s girlhood in colonial America to a future warped by environmental collapse and political unrest. Refusing the erasure of the lives of women, Indigenous peoples, and Black people who have always called this region home, this eloquent and distinctive novel is a necessary remedy for the continued distortion of a land and its inhabitants.

Set in a fictional town, at a fictional school, Linda N. Masi’s debut novel, Fine Dreams, rewrites myth and history. Framed by a ghost’s first-person narrative, the book centers on four young friends, the stars of their school’s track team. While studying for exams, they are kidnapped and taken to a terrorist encampment. Two are claimed as “wives” by their captors, one is forced to wear a suicide vest, and each is subjected to appalling violence and terror. While their stories resonate with a widely publicized 2014 abduction, these four young women could have been taken in any of the many incidents that have plagued the Nigerian people for years. Even though they are abducted and abused by men in power and forced to survive in a dark place like Persephone, Masi’s protagonists offer new endings for Persephone’s story. In Masi’s telling, these resilient young women recover their dreams and hopes to live in daylight once again. No matter where they travel or where they stay, they gain self-determination and reclaim their dreams.

A runaway circus lion haunts a small town where two lovers risk more than their respective marriages. A junket to Cuba and an ambassador’s dalliance with a niece hide dark secrets and political revolution. “I’ve always had a knife,” says the unstable stepson to his parents. Inventive, dark, and absurd, the stories in The Long Swim capture Terese Svoboda’s clear-eyed, wry angle on the world: a place of violence and uncertainty but also wild beauty, adventure, and love both lasting and ephemeral. Her characters strive for escape—through romance, travel, or more self-destructive pursuits—and collide with the constraints of family and home, their longing for freedom and autonomy often at odds with the desire for safety and harmony. Cynical, irreverent, and formally daring, Svoboda’s stories in The Long Swim are a deft exploration of womanhood and humanity. Waves of provocation and wonder toss the reader and leave them wanting more.

One December evening, when 13-year-old Marta crosses the frozen Lake Superior and reaches the home she shares with her father, she finds a woman standing at their door. As Marta approaches, she realizes the woman, who looks like a tropical bird caught in the snow, is her mother who’d abruptly left them six years before. Marta hopes this is a turning point, that her mother will stay this time—despite hating this town, this island, and their creaky, towering Victorian house. But not everyone in town is thrilled with her mother’s arrival, least of all her dad.Almost as soon as she arrives, however, Marta’s mother abruptly vanishes again, nowhere to be found, leaving Marta with more questions than answers. Her father denies her mother was ever there and Marta is left with the mystery of her mother’s homecoming. She begins to wonder if he is lying, or if there is a deeper secret being kept from her by the entire tight-knit community. As Marta delves into her mother's sudden reappearance and subsequent disappearance, she seeks answers, visiting places that were significant to her mother and questioning people she knew. Desperate for answers that will shed light on the mystery, this quest leads her to uncover a web of secrets that threaten to unravel everything she thought she knew about her family and herself.Gichigami is an eerie coming-of-age novel, weaving between Marta and the person desperately trying to keep Marta and her mother apart. This poignant exploration of the lives of women and girls of the Midwest shines a light on the struggles of absent mothers, runaway daughters, and those who yearn for more than life has offered them. With rich prose and vivid imagery, Lindsey Steffes spins a tale of loss, longing, and betrayal set against the backdrop of the harsh yet beautiful landscape of Lake Superior.

In this debut collection, tangled bonds of love and family collide with a natural world both fragile and ferocious. Upended by grief, a widowed veterinarian seeks solace by fostering a litter of orphaned opossums. A young lawyer embarks on an affair, only to fall into a deeper, stranger entrancement with her lover’s nine-year-old daughter during a weekend on the Lake Huron coast. In the depths of a Wisconsin winter, a recovering alcoholic risks everything to plot a careening course toward atonement. And in the title story, two teenagers steal a car, discover a loaded rifle in the backseat, and set off consequences both devastating and tender for a series of strangers they’ll never meet. Set across the Midwest and rural Appalachia, the stories in Joyriders offer a resonant vision of rural and small-town life: lonely, half-haunted landscapes are pierced with moments of light, and even the most taciturn faces conceal inner worlds both rich and strange. Comfort and heartache abound—entangled, inseparable. “What was Kevin suggesting,” wonders Valerie, after struggling for years to steer her innocent, angry, mysteriously afflicted son through the world, “that she loved him less because of his troubles? Oh, preposterous. More, she wanted to tell him, more.” Characters’ paths repeatedly bend in unforeseen directions, and the shape of each story surprises—illuminating, in this way, the surprising contours of entire lives.

The magical and mundane twist together in this collection of surreal storiesIn this collection of stories set in an uncanny American suburbia and haunted by a lurking unease, the peculiar feeling of ephemeral youth finds its voice. The stories in The Gods in Small Doses depict childhood through a funhouse mirror, as a time of myth and damage, of tenderness and terror. Anything—except what should happen—can happen next.A retired witch traps a goat-killing feral child, a girl becomes obsessed with the regenerative properties of her younger brother’s body, Armageddon is fought between the forces of good (those who like to go to bed early) and evil (those who prefer to stay up late), a supernatural orphan insinuates his way into an all-American family, the god Poseidon wrecks a high-school house party, and the women of a fabulated island city all mysteriously disappear overnight. In these fast, comic, and troubling tales, sweetness and violence vie to become synonymous.This is a universe of both realism and surrealism, of magic and the mundane, where strong but deeply flawed characters fight to exert control over things—time, death, themselves—that can’t be controlled. Dreamlike moments of body horror, catastrophe, and absurdity challenge the reader to embrace the taboo and to expect—always—the unexpected. Bell’s stories offer a twisted, unique, and utterly fascinating take on what it means to “grow up,” and all of the questions that the notion inspires.

A story of mothers, monsters, and the science of longingIn this daring and evocative tale, Agnes Krahn, a chemist trained in Philadelphia, returns to her childhood home after the death of her father. Just a stone's throw from the haunted fields of Gettysburg, the small town of Letort, Pennsylvania is where the Krahn family has lived for six generations—bound by twisted folk wisdom and an uncanny kinship with the crows that loom over their land.Back in the grim farmhouse of her youth, Agnes is drawn into the strange legacy she tried to leave behind. When she discovers an abandoned nest in the barn, she becomes consumed by a scientific—and deeply personal—experiment: to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes has never known herself. As the bird grows, so does its terrifying potential—manifest in language, cunning, and a violent will of its own. What begins as a gesture of love and liberation turns darkly obsessive, echoing the dangerous ambition of Frankenstein’s monster and the generational trauma buried in the soil of her family’s past.A thoroughly modern, feminist novel, this is a story of mothers and daughters, inheritance and isolation, and the thin line between care and control. It confronts themes of self-harm and self-preservation, as well as memory and myth, in a narrative as visceral and uncanny as the bird that rises at its heart.

Exploring the power of female friendships in times of despair In the near-future United States, abortion is criminalized. Women are not only stripped of bodily autonomy but are also arrested and put through various punishments, including a Christian fundamentalist rehabilitation program and manual labor. Thrown together in this harrowing corrections process, two women, E and M, form a deep bond. Rippling through time and space, Glass Eel illuminates an imminent nightmare while exploring the unbreakable force of female friendship in times of despair. Before serving their sentences, E is a romantic who is prone to vivid, maladaptive daydreaming, and M is an empiricist studying to become a marine biologist. Isolated by her devout mother, E turns inward, developing a passion for poetry and myth. At the exact wrong time, she becomes involved with a married man. When E becomes pregnant, he gaslights her, denying their entire relationship. M, while working as a part-time performer at an underwater mermaid theater, carries the heavy responsibility of being the sole provider for her sick mother. One night, she reluctantly accompanies her roommate to a party where she's raped. Both E and M make the difficult decision to terminate their pregnancies and are eventually arrested for it. Brought together to serve their sentences, E and M painstakingly labor underground to unclog the Chicago sewers at night. By day, they wander the bleak shore of a radioactive industrial lake, home to mysterious unearthly creatures. E and M unravel psychologically, desperate to cope with their impossible new reality as they grasp at their last real connection—their friendship—to make it through this dystopian time. Glass Eel explores the bond between E and M to show how people hold each other together when everything feels like it is falling apart.