With book titles like “Wife with Knife: Stories that Cut” (by Molly Giles), “The Man With Eight Pairs of Legs” (by Leslie Kirk Campbell), and “The Fell” (by Sarah Moss), it’s clear you’re not going to have a typical reading experience. But then, we’re not in normal times. With often hilarious, always startling prose, these three fiction writers explore what happens when we’re pushed to extremes. In Campbell’s award-winning story collection (“writing that increases empathy in the world,” says Anthony Doerr), the body literally is marked by memory. Renowned writing teacher Molly Giles’s quick short stories make you gasp with their sudden twists and turns of phrase (“I love you, old terror,” one character says to another). In Sarah Moss’s riveting short novel, a woman who can’t bear pandemic lockdown (hello!) runs away and falls. The book’s New York Times review, titled “Keep Calm and Go Quietly Mad” (yes, we stole it), opens with one of the character’s musings: “Apocalypse isn’t what it used to be.”
