Softie
Stories
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
2025 PEN America Finalist, Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
2025 National Book Award Honoree, “5 Under 35"
2025 Gold Medal, Independent Publishing Book Awards (IPPY): Short Fiction
In beautifully melancholy stories of magical realism, the women and girls in Softie transform their bodies and test their sanity, trying to find meaning in the loneliest of places.
A former child star haunted by a past she can’t remember. An Afro-French girl with an obsession for ear lobes. A loner whose only friend is hiding a terrible, otherworldly secret. Each of these stories shares situations that are sometimes fantastical, sometimes commonplace, but always strange. From a Corsican vacation town in its off-season to hospital rooms and a seedy hotel suite in Chicago, experience the every day come fully untethered from reality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Howell debuts with a beautiful and striking collection about friendship, secrets, and unspeakable desires. "Lobes," the outré opener, explores the narrator's obsession with her lover's earlobes, to the point that she fantasizes about biting or cutting them off (with his consent) and keeping them as trophies. In "Cherry Banana," a woman takes a receptionist job at a seedy hotel, where she begins shacking up with long-term guest Henry, who pines for his runaway daughter and lives in the room she'd once checked into with her deadbeat lover. The fantastical "Age-Defying Bubble Bath" follows middle-aged Alda, who's anxious about her wrinkles. After Alda overdoes it with a bottle of high-strength de-wrinkling bubble bath, the bubbles' serum causes her to reverse-age into a little girl. "Kitty and Tabby" concerns one girl coping with body dysmorphia and another who claims to be a shape-shifter yearning to give birth to a boy. Throughout, Howell's discontented characters often settle for a twisted sense of intimacy (as a character in "Devil's Juice" says to her friend about her lover: "I don't know if I love him. I just hate him less than everyone else"). These vivid and harrowing stories are tough to shake.
