In the Between: 21st Century Short Stories

17 stories and 2 comics by established and rising stars in American fiction and graphic narrative

Including contributions by Roxane Gay, Alice Hoffman, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Shivana Sookdeo, and Bryan Washington. In the Between presents characters of differing and mixed cultural backgrounds, genders, sexuality, and ableness, some affected by urban gentrification or the decline of their rural town—all striving to forge a future in today’s divided America. Masterful and boldly intimate, these stories urge us to embrace a complex understanding of who we are as a nation and who we can be as individuals.

Other contributors are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Maria Anderson, Ryka Aoki, Joy Baglio, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Nancy Fulda, Vanessa Hua, Bryan Hurt, Phil Klay, Mister Loki, Casey Robb, Rion Amilcar Scott, Akhil Sharma, and Robert Anthony Siegel.

• To meet her immigrant parents’ expectations, a daughter fakes her way into a top university and finds the only way out is through revenge.
• A strait-laced Black man, an accountant who is repeatedly mistaken for a drug dealer, decides to track down and get to know his double.
• A trans woman considers her new femininity in relation to her activist lesbian friend and her grandmother, who fled from her homeland in war-torn Vietnam.
• An American soldier in Fallujah suffers from PTSD after he covers for his buddy who shoots an Iraqi boy.
• A girl anguishes over choosing to have an abortion amidst questions of environmental destruction.
• After a father disappears into the forest, will his grown son live in their dilapidated trailer and wash dishes in a restaurant forever or will he leave their shrinking logging town?