Roxanne Doty’s Out Stealing Water


Congratulations to Roxanne Doty for her debut novel Out Stealing Water, published by Regal House. Originally a finalist in the Autumn House 2019 fiction contest, Out Stealing Water follows Emily, who must live without water after the city shuts off her family’s access. Her uncle Dwight, who doesn’t believe he should pay for water, simply steals it from others. This is when Emily and her cousin Paula begin stealing, too, trying to collect enough money to leave Phoenix. As their crimes escalate, Dwight joins forces with an armed anti-government group to keep his land out of the government’s hands.

…The consideration of class energize[s] the narrative, which quickly but effectively builds to a suspenseful final act. Sublime characters stick together in moral dilemmas and gripping drama.

Kirkus reviews

Roxanne Doty taught and did research at ASU for 30 years in the School of Politics and Global Studies. Her work has been published in Forge, I70 Review, Soundings Review, Four Chambers Literary Magazine, Lascaux Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature, NewVerseNews, Saranac ReviewGateway Review and Reunion-The Dallas Review. Her short story “Turbulence,” published in Ocotillo Review, was nominated for the 2019 Pushcart Prize. To learn more, visit her website.

The current conflicts in our different Americas are an integral part of Out Stealing Water, not just touched on but the very foundation that holds the plot together from privilege to poverty, spirituality to doubt, money and power to hardscrabble lives lived on the brink of our cities. The story explores our culture in which losing and winning come down to the dreams and promises on a postcard. Read this illuminating book! It will shine in the dark while you stay awake, hurrying to find out what is next, but slowing down to savor Roxanne Doty’s writing and the depth of her novel.

Kate Green, author of Shattered Moon

To purchase Out Stealing Water, go here.

Roxanne Doty’s short story “Neighbors” appeared in Issue 27 of Superstition Review.

A photo of Chauna Craig

Chauna Craig’s Wings & Other Things


Congratulations to Chauna Craig for her new short story collection Wings & Other Things, published by Press 53. While her characters differ in terms of circumstance, each story centers around women trying to fly: a widow searching for her past self, a stranded artist accepting a ride from a stranger, lovers sequestered in a cornfield. Her collection is both a migration and a transformation, filled with unusual, eye-catching phrases. Railroad tracks morph into an “infinite number line,” and a lightning bolt becomes a “tentacle of the unseen.” Craig captures longing, loss, and freedom as she tells the women’s stories.

The women in these stories are certainly willing to pay to get where they need to go—whether it’s out of bad relationships or into new formed lives. These stories are full of hard-won wisdom, sharp insights, and generous compassion. Her characters suffer from and bear up under ordinary though devastating failures and disappointments, but through force of will, wit, and wonder they persevere and often prevail.

Kerry Neville, author of remember to forget me

Chauna Craig grew up in Montana. Her work has appeared in Jellyfish Review, Blue Fifth Review, and elsewhere. To learn more about her, visit her website.

In small-town, rural, or city life, these women, in perfectly drawn revelatory moments, show us what we settle for and how we are haunted by what could’ve been. These stories and the characters in them disquiet and rivet, demanding our attention and inviting our reflection on how one reconciles the desire for escape with the need to stay put. Subtle and artful in its choreography of miscommunications and conflicting desires, this is an intelligent and absorbing collection. 

donna miscolta, author of Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories

Visit Press 53 to purchase Wings & Other Things.

A photo of Bojan Louis.

Bojan Louis’s Sinking Bell: Stories


Winner of an American Book Award for his poetry collection Currents, Bojan Louis is making his fiction debut with Sinking Bell: Stories. Published by Graywolf Press, Sinking Bell: Stories is a collection that centers on collisions of love, cultures, and racism. All of Louis’s stories take place in or near Flagstaff, Arizona, and they include stunning portrayals of all kinds of people—from metalheads to construction works—struggling to live their complicated lives.

Louis’s prose carries his poetic sensibility with a decided rhythm and resonant detail, and the narrators achingly convey their outsider status. The result is immersive and powerful.

publishers weekly

Bojan Louis is Diné of the Naakai dine’é, born for the Áshííhí. His debut novel Currents received an American Book Award in 2018. His work has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Yellow Medicine Review, and elsewhere. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona. To learn more about him, visit his website.

Sinking Bell doesn’t shy away from the dim corners of life. . . . You’re going to want to take your time with this one, and then you’re going to want to press it into the hands of all your best people.

Kelli Jo Ford, author of crooked hallelujah

To purchase Sinking Bell: Stories, go here.

An interview with Bojan Louis—”Auditory Hallucinations”—appeared in Issue 20 of Superstition Review.

A photo of Philip Gross

Philip Gross’s The Thirteenth Angel

Congratulations to Philip Gross for his upcoming poetry collection The Thirteenth Angel, published by Bloodaxe Books. Coming November 17, 2022, Gross’s collection examines patterns in the world around us and also within ourselves. It teeters between the before and after of the pandemic years, focusing in the opening sequences on almost-aerial views of London streets and Europe’s motorways. It ultimately reveals that “if there are angels, they are nothing otherworldly, but formed by angles of incidence between real immediate things.”

Moving from island to island, continent to continent, Between the Islands is concerned with memories, with resonances throughout time, but also with emergent dangers; ecological fears and the rising islands of refuse accumulating in our oceans.

Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 2020 [on Between the islands]

Philip Gross has written over twenty books of poetry and won a number of awards, including the TS Eliot Prize for his book The Water Table. To learn more about Gross, visit his website.

Great poetry is like walking on water. In this paradoxical, humane collection, Philip Gross achieves that miracle.

Polly clark, The Guardian [on the water table]

To preorder The Thirteenth Angel, go here.

Philip Gross’s poem “Survivor” appeared in Issue 6 of Superstition Review.

A photo of Alice Kaltman

Alice Kaltman’s Almost Deadly, Almost Good


Alice Kaltman’s short story collection Almost Deadly, Almost Good will be released this November, published by the Word West Press. Kaltman’s book features fourteen interlinked short stories: the first embody the seven deadly sins, the last the seven heavenly virtues. With rich, reoccurring characters and compelling plots, Kaltman creates a collection that’s impossible to put down.

Kaltman’s opening story “Sunset Lounge (Lust)” follows a woman pining after her daughter’s attractive older boyfriend. In an unexpected but riveting twist, we discover tantalizing details about the boyfriend in “A Fancy Job (Gluttony),” and the ultimate conclusion comes in “Knickers in a Twist (Charity).” Just as the stories are linked, Almost Deadly, Almost Good links good and bad, with a special attention to gender and class.

Story after brilliantly written story, we’re shown our own fears, our own foibles, our own forbidden desires, and tenderest heartaches. These are stories of human beings under pressure, at their most “changeable” moments, and we readers can’t look away. Nor do we want to. With candor, wisdom, and humor, almost deadly, almost good  reminds us to be good to ourselves and to each other for we are all at once, beautiful and aching and ridiculous.

Kathy Fish, Author of Wildlife: Collected Works from 2003-2018

Alice Kaltman is the author of Staggerwing, Dawg Towne, Wavehouse, and The Tantalizing Tale of Grace Minnaugh. To learn more about Kaltman, visit her website.

To preorder Almost Deadly, Almost Good, go here.


We’re also very excited to share an interview that dives deeper into Kaltman’s collection. This interview was conducted via email by our Blog Editor, Brennie Shoup.

Brennie Shoup: Could you discuss your inspirations for Almost Deadly, Almost Good?

Alice Kaltman: The original idea for a linked collection occurred to me after I wrote the first story in the book, Sunset Lounge. It was so clearly a story about LUST that it got me thinking how fun it would be to create a chapbook based on the Seven Deadly Sins. I already had a few stories and characters that fit the bill for other Sins: Greedy Senator Levinson from Into the Woods, poor languorous Cecil from Cecil’s New Friends, envious Greta from Come On Over to My Place. Once I’d finished the other sinful stories, I fiddled with content to link them. Characters appear deeply in the plots of other stories, or sometimes they just pass by. So much fun!

BS: This collection is full of humor. Could you discuss this humor and how you balanced it with more serious themes?

AK: I’ve always felt that pathos is more tolerable if it can be softened with humor. That’s not always the case, and there are writers out there who do gut-punching stuff that I love, that make me weep. Sometimes tragedy needs to stand on its own broken, bloody legs. But in my own writing, I veer towards the humorous. It makes it feel more human and authentic to my vision of people and the crazy misguided things they do. I’ve been a psychotherapist for over 30 years. If you can’t laugh, you’ll sink. Need I say more? 

BS: Despite its title and theme, most of the stories in this collection don’t appear to be explicitly religious. What made you choose the motif of the seven deadly sins and seven heavenly virtues? 

AK: I can’t recall who it was, but I mentioned this project to someone along the way and they said, “Hey, why don’t you do the Heavenly Virtues also?” I had no idea what the Seven Heavenly Virtues were. I’m an agnostic Jew, who veers towards the areligious. And Jews don’t really ‘do’ sins and virtues. But I looked the Virtues up and …goldmine. I fiddled with new content and old content, pulled some sections from my novel Dawg Towne, added some new stories and revisited old ones. It was super fun to change POVs, add links that weren’t there before, change timelines, etc. Plagiarizing one’s own work is one of a writer’s deepest pleasures. Or at least one of mine.

A photo of Su Cho.

Su Cho’s The Symmetry of Fish


Congratulations to Su Cho for her debut poetry collection The Symmetry of Fish, published by Penguin Books. Winner of the National Poetry Series, Cho’s collection explores immigration, family, and language. At the heart of the collection is a coming-of-age narrative, and Cho offers insights about how language changes and condenses over generations, not diluted but distilled.

Each year, the National Poetry Series chooses five poetry manuscripts to publish, with the goal of increasing the number of poetry collections published and available. Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck, chose Su Cho’s manuscript for publication.

In her debut collection, The Symmetry of Fish, Su Cho presents us with a speaker who attempts to separate seemingly unlike things: the religious and flippant, the fishbone from the flesh, herself from her memories. In one poem Cho writes of a desire ‘to isolate these moments / pipette them into test tubes / whirl them in a centrifuge.’ Lucky for us, this turns out to be an impossible endeavor. Instead, we are graced with a glorious combination of the incompatible…

Paige lewis, author of Space Struck

Su Cho’s essay “Cleaving Translation” won the 2019 Wabash Prize in Nonfiction. She was a finalist for the 2019 Black Warrior Review Nonfiction Contest and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. To learn more about her, visit her website.

This poetry is quite marvelous. All hits no skips. I was incredibly moved by these poems about family and immigration and the relationship we have to languages. I particularly loved the poem about translating for parents. I look forward to more from Su Cho.

Roxane gay, author of Hunger

The Symmetry of Fish will be available October 11, 2022. To preorder the collection, go here.

Picture of Jen Michalski

Jen Michalski’s The Company of Strangers


Congratulations to Jen Michalski for her new short story collection The Company of Strangers, coming in January 2023. Published by Braddock Avenue Books, The Company of Strangers follows members of Generation X, who are often queer and always searching for meaning and happiness in their lives. Michalski examines the themes of eroding community and family in a variety of ways: from a gay man suddenly confronted with parenthood to a lesbian having an affair with her brother’s wife.

The Company of Strangers is perfect for those searching for messy characters who are confused about what kind of lives they’ve lived and looking for ways to make meaning in them.

Fueled by love, longing, and regret, these captivating stories drop us into the lives of people we come to care deeply about. These are rich, wild, surprising romps of stories with endings that wow. What an immense pleasure to be in the company of these strangers, thanks to Jen Michalski’s brilliant storytelling.

Kathy Anderson, author of Bull and Other Stories

Jen Michalski’s work includes The Tide King, The Summer She Was Underwater, Close Encounters, and others. To learn more about her, visit her website.

A kaleidoscopic and candid exploration of the gritty corners of our desires and all that is left unsaid. By turns irreverent and deeply heartbreaking, Michalski masterfully constructs a collage of sexuality, belonging, and a search for what is possible atop strip malls, parking lots, and bowling alleys. Reminiscent, in some ways, of the genre-pushing work of Zach Doss, Etgar Keret, and Kim Chinquee, Michalski unequivocally carves out a space that is all her own—daring, deeply human, and often gut-wrenching.

Sequoia nagamatsu, author of how high we go in the dark

To preorder The Company of Strangers, go here.

Jen Michalski’s short story “Are You Ready to be Heartbroken?” appeared in Issue 27 of Superstition Review.

Contributor Update, Patricia Ann McNair

Join Superstition Review in congratulating past contributor Patricia Ann McNair on her forthcoming book Responsible Adults by Cornerstone Press, which will be released on December 4th. The book was selected for Cornerstone Press’ Legacy Series and takes a look at the Midwestern human experience and makes the reader wonder ” What happens when responsible adults are anything but responsible people? When they are at best, irresponsible, and at worst, dangerous?”

With startling honesty, precise observation, and a deep faith in the beauty of language, Patricia Ann McNair creates a world where the so-called adults in the room abandon, lie, cheat, steal. They’re familiar, these faults, you think as McNair traces the delicate cracks and gaping chasms of the human condition, her gaze unflinching, unnerving, watching as opposing forces collide, unleash catastrophe. Especially then. Who, she seems to ask, is left behind and why turn away? In this remarkable collection, McNair hits her writerly stride with a sureness that is nothing less than breathtaking. – Christine Rice, author of Swarm Theory

Click here to see Cornerstone Press’ announcement for the launch of Responsible Adults. Be sure to also check out Patricia’s website and Twitter, as well as her piece featured in Issue 3.

Contributor Update, Darrin Doyle

Join Superstition Review in congratulating past contributor, Darrin Doyle, on his upcoming release. Darrin will be releasing a new short story collection called “The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions.” It is part of Wolfson Press’s American Storyteller’s series and it’s scheduled to release in March 2021. Darrin Doyle teaches at Central Michigan University. The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions is his fifth book of fiction. He’s the author of the story collections Scoundrels Among Us and The Dark Will End the Dark (Tortoise Books) and the novels The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo (St. Martin’s Press) and Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet:A Love Story (LSU Press). He lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan with three other humans and a cat.

“The stories in Darrin Doyle’s new collection are full of rich, complicated characters and unique, unusual situations. The dark humor and pathos in these highly imaginative stories reminded me of the brilliant films of David Lynch. If Lynch wrote short fiction, it would doubtless lurk in the same neighborhood as Darrin Doyle’s.” – Christine Sneed, author of The Virginity of Famous Men and Little Known Facts

Check out Darrin’s interview with Wolfson Press here, as well as what Goodreads has to say about Darrin’s upcoming book here. To see what else Darrin is up to, take a look at his Twitter. See also his fiction featured in Issue 16.

Contributor Update, Thomas Gresham

Join us in congratulating past Superstition Review contributor Thomas “Tex” Gresham on the release of his experimental collection, Heck, Texas. Tex is a screenwriter and fiction author and is currently studying screenwriting at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. The book is a play on the stereotypical disreputable Texas town and lies somewhere between the real and imaginary. The book was released on September 4th and is available at Barnes&Noble, Bookshop, and Amazon.

The back of Heck, Texas reads: “Somewhere deep in East Texas, the hunt is on, fueled by self-hate, cough syrup, white whales, massive zits, freakshows, madness, dead pets, lost children, killer coffee, rats, Satan, good times, bad people, vomit, dementia, diarrhea, sex, and clowns. Your favorite brand of disease is back in stock. Welcome to Heck, Texas.”

Congratulations, Tex!

Stay up-to-date with Tex by visiting his website here or his Twitter here. Be sure to also take a look at his short story for Issue 21 here.