Emergency: Stories

Written by Kathleen Alcott

Narrated by Carolyn Jania

From an "exquisite" (The New Yorker) writer, a searing volume of prizewinning stories starring women facing points of no return.

A professor finds a photograph of her deceased mother in a compromising position on the wall of a museum. A twenty-something's lucrative remote work sparks paranoia and bigotry. A transplant to a new city must make a choice about who she trusts when her partner reveals a violent history. The summer after her divorce from an older man, an exiled painter's former friends grapple with rumors that she attempted to pass as a teenager.

In this long-awaited debut collection, Kathleen Alcott turns her skills as a stylist on the unfreedoms of American life-as well as the guilt that stalks those who survive them. Emergency roams from European cities to scorched California towns, drug-smeared motel rooms to polished dinner parties, taking taut, surprising portraits of addiction, love, misogyny, and sexual power. Confronting the hidden perils of class ascension, the women in these stories try to pay down the psychic debts of their old lives as they search for a new happiness they can afford.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Jul 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781696612494

Kathleen Alcott

Born in 1988 in Northern California, Kathleen Alcott is the author of the novels Infinite Home and The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets. Her short stories and nonfiction have appeared in Zoetrope: All Story, ZYZZYVA, The Guardian, Tin House, The New York Times Magazine, the Bennington Review, and elsewhere. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award; her short fiction has been translated into Korean and Dutch. She divides her time between New York City, where she teaches fiction at Columbia University, and Vermont, where she serves as a 2018-2019 visiting professor at Bennington College.