ISBN 978-1-7355727-1-0 (e-book) | Short stories

Viscerally rendered lives and startling irrealities collide in this highly anticipated debut and Winner of the Holland Prize for Fiction.

Weaving together fabulist invention and gritty realism, Rebecca Fishow’s debut collection, The Trouble with Language, unearths stories of men and women whose traumatic experiences make way for dazzlingly cerebral lives. A young man finds a severed head at his door years after his mother takes her own life. A married couple initiates a bloody jailbreak. A woman poses nude for strangers in attempts to pay for mental health treatment, while another finds herself rapidly shrinking in a hotel room. No two of these surprising and playful fictions are alike, and each encourages us to peek behind life’s curtains to discover more bizarre, enchanting, and joyful truths.

Wondrously assured, The Trouble with Language heralds the arrival of a major talent.

“These stories burst with demented charm. Fans of Etgar Keret and Amelia Gray will relish this exciting debut.” —CATHERINE LACEY, author of Pew and The Answers

“A haunting, compelling, beautifully written trip through an America just below the surface of this one. Fishow is so alert to the world, through her language, that it makes the reader more alert to the world too. A wonderful debut that announces the arrival of a new, deeply poetic, voice to our literature.”
—GEORGE SAUNDERS, author of Lincoln in the Bardo

“I could read any one of these stories any number of times, and their joy, darkness and intelligence would remain fresh, mysterious and bracing. Fishow is an extraordinary talent.”
—RIVKA GALCHEN, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

“In one of Fishow’s otherwordly stories, everything turns to quicksand: a cat melts into the floor, an engagement ring melts off the narrator’s finger. ‘Forever is not so frightening on a grand scale,’ the story says, ‘but small forevers are another story. The forever between two grains of sand. The forever between zero and one.’ Fishow finds, excavates, and crystallizes all kinds of unexpected forevers in these stories, between lovers or halves of the self, or between the world we think we inhabit, and the one Fishow shows us, striking and askew and full of poetry.” —CAITLIN HORROCKS, author of The Vexations

“Rebecca Fishow’s The Trouble With Language is exuberant and urgent, like a trapped scream. The collection is a funhouse, each meticulously crafted story offering a shock, a thrill. By the end your throat aches, your ears ring, and you can’t wait to go right back in.”
—LINDSAY HUNTER, author of Eat Only When You’re Hungry

“Fishow is a vital talent who’ll turn your perceptions around on a dime. She’s proof that the best fablistic fictions are not, as detractors say, ‘squibs,’ but disturbances, meditations, and plots alive with dreams: profound. I hope in the future they’ll remember us and our lives through Fishow’s prose.”
—STACEY LEVINE, author of Frances Johnson and Dra—

“Rebecca Fishow is a writer who knows the exact moments when we will tell the truth about our lies and when we will lie about our truths. Her jumps between the absurd and everyday are so convincing and astute, it will leave you breathless. Fishow is a virtuoso.”
—EMILY SCHULTZ, author of The Blondes and Little Threats

“Rebecca Fishow’s tales transport you to a mirror world where the odd and the alien feel both fantastical and familiar. At a time when the truth is stranger than fiction, these beautifully strange fictions ring with essential truths—a mesmerizing and memorable debut.” —RYAN RIDGE, author of New Bad News

“Bright with longing, anger, and a hint of nostalgia, Fishow’s stories show us what it is like to search for a place to set down roots. Her characters light you up with their incisive wit and candor. Beautiful and elegant, her sentences stay with you, burned like an afterimage. ”
—AMANDA MARBAIS, author of Claiming a Body

“In stories brief and expansive, with mordant wit and a deft touch, Rebecca Fishow surveys the disorienting topography of our daily dread and darkest longings. She maps it all via crackling, off-kilter sentences that make startling leaps in logic, landing us in the most inscrutable places, only to remind us, gently and drolly, this is where we have always been.” —DAVID NUTT, author of The Great American Suction

“The Trouble with Language is an uncanny and magnetic collection of stories. Rebecca Fishow blends the mundane with the macabre to fantastic effect. Her voice is wholly original, at once mysterious and matter-of-fact. These stories are dark celebrations of the disembodied, the maimed, the starved, and the reclaimed parts of the self. The endings are so masterful they will leave you thinking long after you’ve turned the page.” —RACHEL SWEARINGEN, author of How to Walk on Water

“Equally macabre and lovely, solemn and wry, Fishow’s gutsy, unforgettable stories emanate from both beyond this world and straight from its unvarnished core. With a voice that echoes Kelly Link, Elizabeth McCracken, and Lorrie Moore, but is fully and firmly authentic, The Trouble with Language announces an unsettling new American talent.” —WHITNEY COLLINS, author of Big Bad (forthcoming)

Rebecca Fishow is the author of the chapbook The Opposite of Entropy (Proper Tales Press, 2018). Her work has appeared widely in print and online, including publications in Tin House, Quarterly West, Joyland, and Smokelong Quarterly. She holds an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University, where she was a Cornelia Carhart Ward fellow. She lives in Maryland with her husband, and teaches creative writing.