Praise for Strange Weather

The sensibility overseeing these fine stories is curious, clever, quick, hilarious, and heartbreaking. The world contained between the covers of Strange Weather is both realistic and magical, silly and sublime, “romance and raunch. Just like real life.” When a character working a desk job in a toxic chemical plant announces wistfully that “nothing’s blown up,” the reader completely understands her itch for disaster, for the explosion that threatens. Hagenston truly relishes the human urge for trouble that resides just next to the equally human instinct for comfort. Her liars are among the most truthful characters I’ve encountered in a long while.

  — Antonya Nelson, author of Nothing Right and Some Fun

Strange Weather is just the right title for Becky Hagenston’s terrific new story collection. The characters and stories herein are changeable, unpredictable in the extreme: tender as brand-new love in one moment, mean as life the next; realistic in one story, fantastical in another. Just when you think you’ve got these characters and their messed-up lives pegged, they do something wonderful, or awful, or both, to utterly surprise you, and often themselves. A wonderful book.

  — Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

With extraordinary wit and understanding and stunning emotional accuracy, not to mention an uncanny ability to track which way the wind blows, Becky Hagenston trains a weather eye on those most unstable of fronts—human beings in their dealings with each other. Smart work from a smart writer.

  — Janet Peery, author of What the Thunder Said

About the Author

Becky Hagenston's first collection of stories, A Gram of Mars, won Sarabande Books’ Mary McCarthy Prize as well as the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Her stories have appeared in the O. Henry anthology, The Southern Review, Mid-American Review, The Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse, and many other journals. She lives in Starkville, Mississippi, where she is an associate professor of English at Mississippi State University.