Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR PEACH PIT

"These playful, brutal stories about women on the edge are shot through with raw tenderness, caustic humour and gorgeous textures. A must for anyone interested in what the short story can do." —Lara Williams, author of Supper Club and The Odyssey

“PEACH PIT is what you get when a bunch of brilliant, audacious writers come together to boldly say the unsayable. Teeming with style, these stories are feral and confrontational, grim and delightfully messy, full of bleak truths and dark humor.” —Kimberly King Parsons, author of the National Book Award nominated collection Black Light

“Mesmerizing, dazzling, beguiling. As lustrously complex as womanhood itself, PEACH PIT somehow contains every secret you’ve ever whispered to a friend and all the warped things you think late at night.” —Samantha Allen, author of Patricia Wants to Cuddle

“The electric, provocative, and inventive stories in PEACH PIT shatter preconceived expectations and build glorious new structures from the rubble. This is a stunning anthology, with a line-up that represents some of the most exciting writers working today.” —Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears and The Third Hotel

“This compulsively readable collection from today’s most intriguing writers on life, love, and how we relate to each other is at turns fierce, funny, and absolutely beautiful. You will tear through it bite by delectable bite.” —Elle Nash, author of Deliver Me

“This exquisite anthology, bringing together 16 of the most exciting writers of our time, pushes past the binary of victim and villain that too often limits female characters. What a stunning, shocking, satisfying experience it is to read these stories that subvert all expectations.” —Alissa Nutting, author of Tampa and Made for Love

“I love stories about women behaving badly and this collection is a full Vegas buffet of gals who give no fucks, living purely for their own pleasure, or else finding hot and strange pleasures in each other while scamming the system. And of course, thank god, a few of them harness their anti-patriarchal rage by using sex as power to lure men to their own death or destruction. This book had me gleefully flipping pages into the night, whispering yes yes yes. A polyvocal excavation of women’s psyches and desires by some of the most interesting fiction writers out there, this collection feels like a funhouse of big feelings full of surprising twists, turns, and—duh—mirrors.” —Sam Cohen, author of Sarahland

 ABOUT THE EDITORS

Molly Llewellyn is a twenty-something queer, disabled book blogger from the UK. She is half of the editing team for PEACH PIT coming Fall 2023 from Dzanc, which is her first big editing role. She’s a big fan of ‘weird women’ lit and anything that is the colour green. She lives in the UK.

Kristel Buckley is an editor, publicist and former publisher from the Big Smoke. She is more than happy to talk your ear off about the unfaithful representation of women in history, and her passion is a more equitable, inclusive future for all stories from all voices. She lives in the UK.

 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Alice Ash is the author of the short story collection Paradise Block, which won The Edge Hill Short Story Readers' Prize in 2021. She was longlisted for the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize in 2019, and other writing has been featured in Granta, Refinery29, 3:AM, Hotel, Extra Teeth Magazine, the TLS, and Mslexia, amongst many others. Interests include motherhood, women’s horror writing, domesticity, magical realism, and metamorphosis. Alice’s second book, a novel, will be published by Serpent’s Tail in 2024. Alice teaches at the University of Westminster and Goldsmiths University, and she is an editor with The Literary Consultancy. She lives in the UK.

Alicia Elliott is a Mohawk writer and editor living in Ontario. She has written for The Globe and Mail, CBC, Hazlitt and many others. She’s had numerous essays nominated for National Magazine Awards, winning Gold in 2017 and an honourable mention in 2020. Her short fiction was selected for Best American Short Stories 2018 (by Roxane Gay), Best Canadian Stories 2018, and Journey Prize Stories 30. Alicia was chosen by Tanya Talaga as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out On The Ground, was a national bestseller in Canada. It was also nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and won the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award.

Alison Rumfitt is a writer and semi-professional trans woman. Tell Me I’m Worthless, her debut novel, was published in 2021 by Cipher Press in the UK and in 2023 by Tor Nightfire in the US. Her second novel, Brainwyrms, is coming October 2023. She lives in the UK.

Aliya Whiteley's novels and novellas have been shortlisted for multiple awards including the Arthur C Clarke award and a Shirley Jackson award. Her short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, F&SF, Black Static, Strange Horizons, The Dark, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Guardian, as well as in anthologies such as Unsung Stories’ 2084 and Lonely Planet’s Better than Fiction. She writes in many genres, she takes a lot of long walks during which she thinks up strange things, and she bakes a mean choc chip vanilla cookie. She lives in the UK.

Amanda Leduc is the author of the novel The Centaur’s Wife and the non-fiction book Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Governor General’s Award in Nonfiction (Canada) and longlisted for the 2020 Barbellion Prize (UK). She is also the author of an earlier novel, The Miracles of Ordinary Men. She has cerebral palsy and lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she serves as the Communications Coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), Canada's first festival for diverse authors and stories. She lives in Ontario.

Chana Porter is a novelist, playwright, teacher, MacDowell fellow, and cofounder of The Octavia Project, a STEM and writing program for girls and trans and nonbinary youth that uses speculative fiction to envision greater possibilities for our world. Her debut novel The Seep was an ABA Indie Next Pick, Open Letters Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Book of 2020, a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Times (UK) Best Sci-fi Book of 2021. As a playwright, her work has been produced and developed at New Georges, Playwrights Horizons, Cherry Lane, Dixon Place, Target Margin, and many more. Her second novel The Thick and The Lean is out from Saga/Simon & Schuster spring 2023. Chana is currently adapting Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed into an opera with the composer Ted Hearne. She lives in Los Angeles. Pronouns: she/they

Chantal V. Johnson is a lawyer and writer. Her debut novel, Post-Traumatic, was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. A graduate of Stanford Law School and a former Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow, she lives in New York.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician, writer and PEN /American Robert W. Bingham Debut Fiction award finalist for her story collection White Dancing Elephants: Stories, which was also selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best Debut Fiction and Best Short Story Collection and appeared on "best of" lists for Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Vogue India, and Entertainment Weekly. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, The Millions, Joyland, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Awl, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Community of Writers and Sewanee Writers Workshop. She lives in Massachusetts.

Deesha Philyaw's debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and the 2022-2023 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Deesha lives in California.

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice books Bestiary and Gods of Want (One World/Random House), and two forthcoming books, a novel titled Organ Meats (One World) and a novella titled Cecilia (Coffee House Press). She lives in California.

Lauren Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent the novel MATRIX (September 2021). Her work has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, was a three time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and twice for the Kirkus Prize, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Florida.

Maisy Card is the author of the novel These Ghosts are Family, which won an American Book Award, the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize in Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, AGNI, The New York Times, Guernica, and other publications. She lives in New Jersey.

Megan Giddings has degrees from University of Michigan and Indiana University. In 2018, she was a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial fund grant for feminist fiction. Her novel, Lakewood, was published by Amistad in 2020. It was one of New York Magazine’s 10 best books of 2020, one of NPR’s best books of 2020, a Michigan Notable book for 2021, was a nominee for two NAACP Image Awards, and a finalist for a 2020 LA Times Book Prize in The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction category. In 2021, she was named one of Indiana University’s 20 under 40. Her second novel, The Women Could Fly (Amistad 2022), was named one of The Washington Post’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy novels of 2022, one of Vulture’s Best Fantasy books of 2022 and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She lives in Minneapolis.

Sarah Rose Etter is the author of The Book of X, winner of a Shirley Jackson Award, and the novel Ripe (Scribner, July 2023). Her work has appeared in TIME, Bomb, The Cut, Vice, Oxford American, and more. You can find out more at www.sarahroseetter.com. She lives in California.

Vanessa Chan was born and raised in Malaysia. Her short stories have been published in Electric Lit, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, and more. She was the 2021 Stanley Elkin scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference and has also received scholar awards to attend the Bread Loaf and Tin House writers’ conferences. THE STORM WE MADE, her first novel, will be published with Marysue Rucci Books in 2024. She lives in the U.S.

Yah Yah Scholfield is a horror artiste, Brooklyn born and Atlanta raised. Their work can be found in Fiyah Lit magazine, and a handful of other magazines and anthologies. They published their debut novel “On Sundays, She Picked Flowers’ in 2021, and they have a short story collection coming out in 2023. When Yah Yah is not crafting horrors, they're working as a professional stay-at-home daughter and wrangler of their two cats, Sophie and Chihiro. They live in the US.