These new short story collections explore three distinctive corners of a fractured America. Ladee Hubbard, recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, discusses her new collection, The Last Suspicious Holdout. Its 13 interlocking stories depict residents of a Black community in the period from 1992 to 2007—a time when racialized stereotypes took on new life in the national media. In It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories, winner of the 2022 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Ramona Reeves’s linked stories introduce Babbie and Donnie of Mobile, Alabama, highlighting deep-rooted issues of race and class in the New South. Manuel Muñoz, recipient of the Whiting Award and three O. Henry Awards, offers a long-awaited new collection, The Consequences, exploring the lives and dreams of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in the area outside Fresno in the 1980s.
Moderator: Chaitali Sen, author of the novel The Pathless Sky