“Weather” isn’t a comfort or a little packet of wishes for a healthy planet - it’s a meticulously constructed (often hilarious, sometimes disconsolate) lament for our old modes of thinking. She won Narrative 's Ninth Annual Poetry Contest and the Matt Clark Editor's Choice Prize, as well as short fiction prizes from and Blue Earth Review. Slipping into what Offill calls “a kind of twilight knowing,” she confronts the fact that flooded New York streets and barren apple trees aren’t a possibility but a certainty. Raven Leilani's work has been published in Granta, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Narrative, Yale Review, Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. In “Weather,” a librarian named Lizzie is weighed down by the torrent of information she keeps encountering about our doomed planet. Offill’s fragmentary novels are like stepping-stones: You jump from one isolated phrase or anecdote to the next, sometimes sure-footed but occasionally thrown off balance. “Want” brilliantly exposes the daily exhaustion of generational decline. They’d expected life to be … better than this, and therein lies the cruel slap so masterfully delivered in this novel. Elizabeth lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two small children they’re filing for bankruptcy and constantly on the brink of financial collapse. Reading Steger Strong’s swirling, incisive “Want” is like being caught in a windstorm of American familial crises: overpriced childcare, overlapping jobs, overreaching men. Things weren’t so great in America before the pandemic, either.
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