Thanks for This Riot: Stories

By Janelle Bassett

Book Overview

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction
Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection

Thanks for This Riot explores the limits of kindness, the weight of being needed, and the fear of being misunderstood. A group counselor is taunted by a truth-divining piano bench, a voice actor shouts her abortion at the state capitol, a tired caregiver tangles with a pair of stand-up comics, a small-town newspaper office shelters an otherworldly tattletale, a backwoods acupuncturist leans on her least-exciting offspring, a girl in a strapless bra takes a vengeful go-kart ride, and a woman gets surgery to lower her expectations (she thinks it went "okay"). Grouped by types of riot--external riots, internal riots, and laugh riots--Thanks for This Riot is a poignant and mordantly funny collection with a distinctly feminist viewpoint.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1496240332
• ISBN13: 9781496240330
• Release Date: September 2024
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 186 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"