Offseason

Offseason is narrated by a self-described 'sexually frigid, spiritually sick, and morally warped' PhD dropout who arrives at an all-girls boarding school in a remote coastal tourist town to teach English.
While manically lecturing her students about Charles Dickens's Bleak House, she veers from her syllabus to highlight the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin, the impact of the Holocaust and the Soviet Union on her family, and the crucial distinctions between ephebophilia and pedophilia.
Obsessed with her own trauma and the trauma - real or imagined - of everyone around her, her quest to escape the past is undermined by her inability to ever stop talking about it.
Savage, hilarious and profound, it marks the arrival of a truly original literary talent.

Avigayl Sharp's fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, New England Review, and other publications, and has received support from Yaddo, the Granum Foundation, and the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. She was the winner of the 2023 DISQUIET Literary Prize and a 2023-2024 writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Avigayl is an assistant editor at American Short Fiction.