The Animal Room, the second short story collection from Lauren Acampora, captures the interconnected lives of neighbors – including the city transplant haunted by the deer carcass hanging in a nearby home’s garage and the psychiatric patient who believes she’s becoming a bird – as well as coworkers, relatives, enemies, lovers, and animals in the small town of Old Cranbury, Connecticut. It’s a picture that sheds light on human nature. Dan Simon’s Ashland: A Novel is told in six voices: among them Carolyn, a young writer at a turning point; Geoff, Carolyn’s writing teacher; Gordon, who arrives in Ashland in his twilight years; and Gordon’s wife, Edith, who inadvertently becomes Carolyn’s spiritual guide and friend. But things aren’t always what they seem in the old mill town, and Carolyn must learn to make her own rules. And in The Queen of Bad Influences: Stories, lives are upended as much by broken hearts as by collapsing dams, mismanaged wars, wildfires, and apocalyptic storms. With irony, compassion, and withering humor, Jim Shepard, a master of catastrophe fiction, reminds us how easily cataclysms can take everything we hold most precious, but also remind us of what is the best of us: the love, friendships, and grace we grant one another.

Buy The Animal Room

Buy Ashland: A Novel

Buy The Queen of Bad Influences: Stories