Fall Together, my debut collection of short stories, was selected from more than 400 manuscripts to become one of three titles published by Gold Wake Press in 2018. Inside this collection, readers will find a broad range of styles and approaches. The title emerges from the space occupied by so many of the characters who populate these pages: they're on the brink of collapse, but find themselves reaching for more, for each other. The book is available on the Gold Wake Press site, Barnes & Noble, Powell's Bookstore, Amazon, and other online venues. Or, look for your copy in your favorite local bookstore. My favorite is Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky.
praise for Fall together
The sensibility overseeing these powerful stories is quirky and playful; Strickley is a connoisseur of a myriad of source materials, from contemporary tabloid fodder to age-old literature and legend. In each piece, a wholly human character comes to life to delight and instruct the reader, to make her revisit what she thought was the familiar world and find it, somehow, faintly shifted and newly fresh.
—Antonya Nelson, author of Bound and Funny Once
Sarah Strickley's work is bold, honest, and confident. Her language is the perfect combination of lyricism and directness. Fall Together is remarkable for its inventive stories that carry the reader into dark territory. A remarkable debut!
—Chris Offutt, author of My Father, the Pornographer and Country Dark
This collection is both artful and absolutely ferocious. Sarah Anne Strickley calmly follows her stories into darkness. I honestly can't think of many writers who are this fearless.
—Chris Bachelder, author of National Book Award Finalist, The Throwback Special
There’s enormous power in Sarah Anne Strickley’s sharp, vivid stories about people who try and fail to conceal their faults and desires. She renders her characters’ sorrow and longing with such force I had to put the book down between stories to recover. Each story in this collection is a marvel of intelligence and empathy.
—Leah Stewart, author of What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw
Sarah Anne Strickley’s stunning debut collection features a long list of memorable characters, survivors of some disasters and creators of others, including crooked cops and their victims, doubting artists, mothers and daughters and their fraught relations, nobles and servants, and those barely hanging on who stubbornly hang on nonetheless and sometimes triumph. In several stories the mundane slips into the mysterious as gracefully as it does in the work of Angela Carter or Aimee Bender, while other stories are more realistic, mournful elegies revealing lives where tragedy swallows some and liberates others. All are shot through with beautiful prose, startling imagery, and a wicked sense of humor, and all investigate the truly important things, the price we pay and the rewards we reap to be that most mystifying of creatures: bewildered, bedeviled, and yet resilient humans.
—Paul Griner, author of Hurry Please I Want to Know
I could not stop reading these strange, sometimes savage, always revelatory tales. Sarah Anne Strickley takes us from coal mine to front porch to trashed riverbank with a fluency and daring that had me holding my breath. She's part poet, part sorceress, and every part seer––and we're the lucky ones who get to discover her.
—Anna Solomon, author of Leaving Lucy Pear
Sarah Anne Strickley's Fall Together is a searingly strange and wonderful gift, a book full of tales insistent on fierce beauty, darkness, art, and complication. With each story, Strickley takes another you thought you knew, and hands it back to you, newly burnished by the powerful alchemy of her re-imagination. You'll disappear into these finely tuned sentences, and the music of their ever-expanding worlds.
—V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Love Marriage