A Small Apocalypse

A gorgeously wrought exploration of what it means to exist in the in-between. In her debut short-story collection A Small Apocalypse, Laura Chow Reeve examines cultural inheritance, hybridity, queerness, and the stickiness of home with an eye for both the uncanny and the realistic: human bodies become reptilian, queer ghosts haunt their friends, a young woman learns to pickle memories, and a theater floods during an apocalyptic movie marathon. The characters in A Small Apocalypse weave in and out of its fourteen stories, confronting their sense of otherness and struggling to find new ways of being and belonging. Heavily steeped in the swampy, feral heat of Florida, these stories venture beyond the problems of constructing an identity to the frontier of characters living their truth in a world that doesn’t yet have a place for them.

Laura Chow Reeve is a writer and illustrator living in Richmond, Virginia. Her fiction has been published in the Rumpus, Catapult, and Joyland, among other publications. Her story in Hyphen was a 2017 winner of the Pen/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and featured on LeVar Burton Reads.

- Milked Snakes- Rebecca- One-Thousand-Year-Old Ghosts- Real Bodies- Suwannee- Hunted- Happiest- A Small Apocalypse- Paper Wasps- Beloved Flamingo Stoned to Death- Upstairs- Three-Card Spread- Migratory Patterns- A Packing List for the End of the World