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With Incendiary Devices, Sarah Anne Strickley blends her trademark lyricism with speculative experiment in the form of stories that take readers into alternative possibilities for the characters present in such canonical works as William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and others. Though not all of the stories are explicit re-tellings, they do all approach familiar storylines and tropes with a fresh—and unabashedly feminist—perspective.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens to Dewey Dell after her mother is safely in the ground, what Amy’s true feelings about her sister Jo’s literary success might be, or what happens when a newspaper headline becomes the story of your life, this is the collection for you.

While Strickley’s critical gaze is brave and unwavering, readers will also enjoy her wry sense of humor and the room she makes in her storyworlds for the possibility of change. Incendiary Devices offers a glimpse of a future in which new narrative patterns shape the stories we know and love, but it doesn’t hesitate to grapple with the limitations of the present. Order now, if you dare!

Praise for incendiary devices

"Incendiary Devices lives up to its name. Each story bursts with flames of heartbreak, shock, and hope. Sarah Anne Strickley works with words the way bombmakers work with TNT." —Patrick Wensink, bestselling author of Fake Fruit Factory and Broken Piano for President

“Sarah Anne Strickley’s Incendiary Devices is a revolution and a revelation. These endlessly readable, voice- and language-driven stories transform histories of sexual violence and assault into fuel to mix the smoothest of Molotov cocktails. Reading them, I felt myself transformed and empowered, filled with the force of a truly gifted storyteller, ready to ignite when the situation calls.” —Siân Griffiths, author of The Sum of Her Parts and Scrapple

"Each of Incendiary Device’s stories contains an entire world, one as radiant, expansive, and dangerous as our own. Sarah Anne Strickley writes my favorite kind of fiction—riveting, lionhearted, meticulously constructed, and overflowing with compassion for its characters, who are exactly as human as its readers."—Jen Fawkes, author of Mannequin and Wife and Tales the Devil Told Me