A lush, glittering short story collection exploring female obsession and desire by an award-winning author Roxane Gay calls “a consummate storyteller.”
From Kentucky to the California desert, these forty-two short stories — ranging from the 80’s and 90’s to present day — expose expose the hearts of girls and women in moments of obsessive desire and fantasy, wildness and bad behavior, brokenness and fearlessness, and more.
On a hot July night, teenage girls sneak out of the house to meet their boyfriends by the train tracks. Members of a cult form an unsettling chorus as they proclaim their adoration for the same man.
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Selected by Ben Marcus as winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, Catapult follows Emily Fridlund’s acclaimed debut novel History of Wolves. Sometimes calculating, at other times bewildered, Catapult‘s characters orbit around each other, enacting a deeply human tragicomedy of wit, misunderstanding, and loss. With dexterous, atmospheric, and darkly comic prose, Fridlund conjures worlds where longing is open-ended, intentions misfire, and the line between comfort and cruelty is often difficult to discern. This is a gripping collection, unsettling as much in its familiarity as in its near-gothic strangeness.
Read our interview with the author on the Reading Group Choices blog!
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