Little Fury

"Casey Bell's Little Fury captures the lives of its finely drawn characters with a sensitive vitality akin to the short stories of Lucia Berlin. Bell's prose is filled with a fragrant heat that makes even the most ordinary of circumstances striking. an evocative, pleasurable debut." -- Marlowe Granados, author of Happy Hour

Blending earthy realism with other-worldly lyricism, these feminist stories linger in the unsettling, slippery in-between of dreaming and waking, voicelessness and uproar, longing and belonging.

Little Fury exposes the underbelly of the female psyche. Focusing on vulnerable moments of flux and transition, Casey Bell's debut merges earthy realism with other-worldly lyricism to linger in the unsettling, slippery in-between of dreaming and waking, voicelessness and uproar, longing and belonging. In the slipstream tradition of Joy Williams, Carmen Maria Machado and Samantha Hunt, Little Fury lingers between the real and surreal.

Best friends in a dystopian near-future seek transcendence while serving time for their abortions; a new mother reeling from post-partum depression slips from reality into fantasy, clinking champagne flutes with the ghost of Simone de Beauvoir; a trans woman rapt by visions and memories after a brutal attack grants last rights to a cow as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean; a woman killed in an industrial accident achieves self-actualization in the afterlife, expanding her consciousness while adrift on a mystical couch. The characters inhabiting Little Fury, a feminist short-story collection, yearn and fumble for connection, seeking hope beneath the rubble of a broken world. Who decides how they exist in their bodies? How can dreams envelop the mind in the face of loss, grief, trauma, isolation? What happens to time, to consciousness, to truth when we're teetering on the brink of collapse? What does it mean to start a family, or to not start a family, in a world that's hopelessly spinning out.
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