Rage and Other Cages: A Collection of Short Stories
In her award-winning collection of short stories, Rage and Other Cages, LaBrie offers lessons on grief, loneliness, and relationships that examine what it means to be female in today’s America.
The characters range from a former child actress turned real estate agent who yearns for her past, to a nurse who must convince a murderer to donate his girlfriend’s organs, to a bartender at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar who is kidnapped by a customer searching for a mysterious key. Bad dates, bad jobs, and bad situations force these characters to use their wits and wiles to survive. In a voice akin to Lorrie Moore meets Mary Gaitskill, LaBrie has her readers laughing on one page and raging on another. Her voice is memorable, raw, and undeniably skillful.
Joyce Carol Oates calls LaBrie’s writing “Mordantly funny, eerily discomforting, & unexpectedly wise — an audacious gathering of stories mirroring our contemporary world.”
“Exemplary storytelling that grapples with important themes. LaBrie’s collection of misanthropic short stories offers meditations on death, dying, grief, and organ donation.” — Kirkus Reviews
“What an extraordinary collection! Impossible, I would have thought, for a book to be laugh-out-loud funny, legitimately chilling, and wonderfully erudite – and yet Rage and Other Cages pulls this combination off, seemingly effortlessly, with gorgeous sentences all the way through. LaBrie is a writer to watch, and this is a collection to come back to, again and again, whether you need your hair raised or your ribs tickled. A killer.” – Adam Dalva, Senior Fiction Editor, Guernica and National Book Critics Circle Committee Member
“This book does not tiptoe. It does not dance around anything. It cuts straight to the damn heart. The real heart. … I am in awe of LaBrie’s unflinching honesty, and her gift for telling the world like it is. This is a writer out for blood.” – Ben Purkert, author of The Men Can’t Be Saved
Aimee LaBrie’s short stories have appeared in the Minnesota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Permafrost Magazine, and others. In 2020, her short story “Rage” won first place in Solstice Literary Magazine’s Annual Literary Contest and her novel in progress won the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award. In 2007, her short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published in a small print run (University of North Texas Press 2007). Her short fiction has been nominated four times for Pushcart Prizes. In 2012 she won first place in the Zoetrope: All-Story’s Short Fiction Competition. Aimee teaches creative writing at Rutgers and works as the senior program administrator for Writers House.
Rage and Other Cages won the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize in 2022.
