Survival Tips: Stories

Propeller Books

“Miriam Gershow’s characters in Survival Tips range from wives and husbands to teenage girls, insecure teachers, unhappy mothers, women on blind dates, and women clinging to friendships past their expiration date. They struggle with communication as their relationships fall apart, or fail to start, or survive. In ten stories you won’t forget, Gershow writes with a sharp eye for detail, impeccably wry wit, and unerring insight into the human heart. A stellar collection.” —Jacqueline Doyle, author of The Missing Girl

“Miriam Gershow has a knack for fictional characters so keenly human that you expect any one of them to show up at your front door. Such is the case for those who populate her marvelous collection, Survival Tips. You want to invite these folks to your table with their shaggy edges and soupçon of cynicism. You want share in their dilemmas, which make you feel heartsick and yet profoundly relieved that you’re not alone in this mad world.” —Debra Gwartney, author of I Am a Stranger Here Myself and Live Through This

"Miriam Gershow’s meticulously crafted stories tenderly explore the strategies people use to survive the humiliations, fears, and ghosts of everyday life - within families and friendships, dating and marriage, and the relentless landscapes of memory. Against the backdrop of troubled cities in an even more troubled world, her deeply authentic characters navigate ways - neither neat nor heroic - to access control in constrained situations: Blind dates and parent-teacher nights, baby showers and birthday parties, sweat lodges and funeral homes. In this poignant examination of human hypocrisy and devotion, Gershow writes with intelligence, humor, and empathy. I loved Survival Tips.” —Corrina Wycoff, author of Damascus House and O Street 

Survival Tips: Stories follows characters through their friendships, their jobs, their marriages, and their grief as they stumble toward connection and meaning. A wife begins communicating to her husband only in rebus puzzles. A new teacher confronts her strongest foes, the parents of a disruptive student. A group of conference-goers join their guru in a jerry-rigged sweat lodge. A woman shows up to her blind date in a Don’t Leave Me t-shirt. With wit and candor, these ten stories examine the ways we live, the mistakes we make, and the paths we take in hopes of delivering us to ourselves and each other. 

The collection features 20-years of stories that have appeared in The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Pithead Chapel, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, and other top publications.

The Local News

Spiegel & Grau

An Oregon Book Award Finalist

“Unusually credible and precise…deftly heartbreaking.” The New York Times

“The Local News achieves two nearly impossible things: It’s a funny book about harrowing circumstances, and it’s a poignant book about high school. Gershow’s narrator, Lydia Pasternak, is droll, keen, and utterly engaging. I couldn’t put this novel down.” —Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See

When fifteen-year-old Lydia Pasternak’s popular older brother Danny disappears late one summer night, she unwillingly becomes a celebrity in her community and an afterthought to her bereaved parents. In Danny’s absence, Lydia blossoms from a bookish outcast to the center of attention, all while grappling with her grudging grief for a brother she never particularly liked. When an intriguing private investigator enters the picture, Lydia finds herself drawn into the search for clues to Danny’s whereabouts. The shocking end to that trail of clues—an end that Lydia never prepares for—will haunt her for the rest of her life. An authentic and at times surprisingly funny dissection of public and private grief, The Local News is an accomplished, affecting debut.

Anthologies

Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away

Alan Squire Publishing.

Did you ever wish, with every cell in your body, that you could run away? From home, from a person, from your job, from yourself? Physically or emotionally, on foot or purely in your own mind? In Already Gone, forty of today’s most exciting writers take flight in all these ways and more.

In an electrifying hybrid collection of fiction and memoir, authors such as Deesha Philyaw, Amber Sparks, and Lilly Dancyger finish what Thelma & Louise started. From a reimagined tale of Lot’s wife fleeing a burning city to a secret elopement to avoid an arranged marriage, from a mother who wins the lottery and abandons her family to a rich man’s obsessive search through space and time, from a drag queen who transforms into her fantasy to a teenager who walks the city streets at night in search of a way out, Already Gone is a collection of runaway stories that explores what it means to fly, to flee, to escape—to search for who we are. These stories and essays take us to dangerous places in order to free us from what holds us back.