Equipment for Lovers

Winner of the 2025 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, Equipment for Lovers explores strangers and strangeness in twelve intimate, uncanny stories perfect for fans of Don DeLillo and Torrey Peters

A self-help group for people with fears of the apocalypse meets in an abandoned warehouse, where one member discovers she can banish the others’ phobias. A six-foot wrench called “The Persuader” moves from branch to branch in a family, lurking under a girl’s bed until the night it’s needed. A sadomasochistic couple wrestles with intimacy after one of them is diagnosed with life-threatening cancer. A teenager grapples with his homosexuality and his mother’s disappearance in junta-controlled Argentina. And a man and his boyfriend, driving through northern Maine, find a woman bent in the middle of the dark road—an encounter that pushes the night into strangeness as if down a rabbit hole.

With their trademark deftness, Crouse’s fifth collection returns to themes of alienation and identity, delivered with an ever-sharper edge. These are stories spilling over with compassion and outrage and bittersweet understanding, a must-read for admirers of Rachel Aviv and Anthony Veasna So.