Today, we have an excerpt from The Loneliness of Glass, a short story collection by prolific short fiction writer and editor Kathleen Furin. Publish today by Cornerstone Press, the collection explores “themes of racial and socioeconomic divides, intergenerational trauma, and women’s bodily autonomy, and how they connect”. Here’s the official synopsis:
A young woman who has lost her half-sister in a tragic murder makes a decision that will doom a dog; a woman becomes obsessed with a cookie jar at an Airbnb; a woman in an interracial marriage returns to her hometown for the first time since she married and must confront what she was taught about race; a woman with unusual powers embeds pieces of dead creatures in the jewelry she creates.
Featuring women on the borders, Kathleen Furin’s stories show how a deepening understanding of inner truths can challenge one’s social belonging, and how this tension between inner and outer selves serves or destroys.
Grappling with complicity, the characters in The Loneliness of Glass struggle as they learn how an intent to “save” others is often fraught with hypocrisy and can lead to self-destruction.
