Wendy J. Fox

Wendy J. Fox is the inaugural winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction for her collection The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories. She is also the author of the novels The Pull of It and If the Ice Had Held, and a forthcoming story collection, What If We Were Somewhere Else. She has written for The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, Self, Business Insider, and Ms., and her work has appeared in literary magazines including Washington Square, Euphony, and Painted Bride Quarterly. More at www.wendyjfox.com

Praise for The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories

What happens when a still life speaks? Wendy J. Fox invites us to eavesdrop. These beautiful, lyrical stories describe ordinary lives: speckled eggshells, creeping vines. Here’s the threat of fire out east and endless rain when the map meets Seattle. Here are characters so real you know them already. They’ve misplaced your keys and borrowed your car. 

—Carol Guess, author of Darling Endangered and Doll Studies: Forensics

Wendy J. Fox's prose is strong and fragile at the same time. As she explores in these stories the hairline fractures in our relationships with life, ourselves and each other, you can't help but hold your breath for the big break you know is coming. The eggshells of everything? Fox owns the category.

—Anastasia Ashman, editor of Tales From The Expat Harem

Wendy Fox’s stories capture a world of grit, sunlight, heat, love and lust—a fully Western world as spare, arresting and luminous in its details as the prose she uses to describe it.  Populated with memorable, deadpan characters—wry, likable for their hidden strengths and never entirely unhopeful despite whatever hard luck they face—her stories often spin on metaphors so richly extended that their complexity takes on a life and force of its own.  The end result is a vision as sharp, imaginative, full of longing and illuminated in poetry as any I’ve recently read.  A fantastic debut and great new voice on the scene!

—Gregory Spatz, author of Half as Happy

Whether she's writing the Rockies or the Cascades, Seattle or Spokane, Colorado or Washington state, Wendy J. Fox has made the West her religion. In eleven gorgeous stories, she celebrates that faith—and these places, and their people—with a quiet, unattenuated grace.

—David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals