Leesa Cross-Smith

A lush, glittering short story collection exploring female obsession and desire by an award-winning writer Roxane Gay calls "a consummate storyteller." From Kentucky to the California desert, these forty-two short stories expose the glossy and matte hearts of girls and women in moments of obsessive desire and fantasy, wildness and bad behavior, brokenness and fearlessness, and more. Teenage girls sneak out on a summer night to meet their boyfriends by the train tracks. A woman escapes suffocating grief through a vivid fantasy life. Members of a cult form an unsettling chorus as they extol their passion for the same man. A love story begins over cabbages in a grocery store. A laundress' life is consumed by obsession for a famous baseball player. Two high school friends kiss all night and binge-watch Winona Ryder movies after the death of a sister. Leesa Cross-Smith's sensuous stories will drench readers in nostalgia for summer nights and sultry days, the intense friendships of teenage girls, and the innate bonds felt between women. She evokes the pangs of loss and motherhood, the headiness and destructive potential of desire, and the pure exhilaration of being female. The stories in So We Can Glow--some long, some gone in a flash, some told over text and emails--take the wild hearts of girls and women and hold them up so they can catch the light. We, moons -- The Great Barrier Reef is dying but so are we -- Unknown legend -- Low, small -- A tennis court -- Tim Riggins would've smoked -- Surreptitious, canary, chamomile -- Winona forever -- Girlheart cake with glitter frosting -- Fast as you -- Chateau Marmont, champagne, Chanel -- Bearish -- All that smoke howling blue -- Pink bubblegum and flowers -- Knock out the heart lights so we can glow -- Get rowdy -- Re: little doves -- Out of the strong, something sweet -- The lengths -- Small and high up -- Small are dark, some are light, summer melts -- Bright -- Dark and sweaty and dirty -- Home safe -- Teenage dreams time machine -- Rope burns -- Get Faye & Birdie -- The Darl Inn -- You should love the right things -- And down we go! -- Crepuscular -- Stay and stay and stay -- Two cherries under a lavender moon -- When it gets warm -- Boy smoke -- Dandelion light -- California, keep us -- Cloud report -- Downright -- You got me -- Eine kleine nachmusik -- A girl has her secrets -- Vincent

The twenty-seven stories in Leesa Cross-Smith’s debut short story collection Every Kiss a War are set to the sounds of "frogs and crickets out back, steam-pulsing like a machine" and "a sad country song that hasn’t been written yet." Men and women love and leave over cigarettes and shots of kitchen table whiskey. She takes us down Kentucky roads in the back of a pickup truck to both truculent and delicate women and rough, rambling men edged with gentleness. A finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award and the Iowa Short Fiction Award, this collection is a ravishing war of characters laid bare as they look for the glow and fight to stay in the light. As affecting as they are sexy and romantic, these stories burn with sweetness like firecrackers and honey as you throw them back and holler for another round.

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here. From the award-winning Southern writer who Roxane Gay calls "a consummate storyteller" comes a cathartic novel about the life-changing weekend shared between two strangers: a therapist and the man she prevents from ending his life. On a rainy October night in Kentucky, recently divorced therapist Tallie Clark is on her way home from work when she spots a man precariously standing on the side of a bridge. Without a second thought, Tallie pulls over and jumps out of the car into the pouring rain. She convinces the man to join her for a cup of coffee, and he eventually agrees to come back to her house, where he finally shares his name: Emmett. Over the course of the emotionally charged weekend that follows, Tallie makes it her mission to provide a safe space for Emmett, though she hesitates to confess that this is also her day job. But what she doesn't realize is that he's not the only one who needs healing -- and she's not the only one with secrets.Alternating between Tallie and Emmett's perspectives as they inch closer to the truth of what brought Emmett to the bridge's edge -- as well as the hard truths Tallie has been grappling with in her own life -- This Close to Okay is a vibrant, powerful story of two strangers brought together by wild chance at the moment they needed each other most.

Four women take fate into their own hands in this big-hearted story of friendship, resilience, and revenge on monstrous men, from the award-winning author of Half-Blown Rose. Taking inspiration from the infamous, empowering song, Goodbye Earl follows four best friends through two unforgettable summers, fifteen years apart. In 2004, Rosemarie, Ada, Caroline, and Kasey are in their final days of high school and on the precipice of all the things teenagers look forward to when anything in life seems possible . . . from falling in love, to finding their dream jobs, to becoming who they were meant to be. In 2019, Kasey has returned to her small Southern hometown of Goldie for the first time since high school—and she still hasn’t told even her closest friends the truth of what really happened that summer after graduation, or what made her leave so abruptly without looking back. Now reunited with her friends in Goldie for a wedding, she’s determined to focus on the simple joy of being together again. But when she notices troubling signs that one of them might be in danger, she is catapulted back to that fateful summer. This time, Kasey refuses to let the worst moments of her past define her; this time, she knows how to protect those she loves at all costs. Uplifting, sharp-edged, and unapologetic, Goodbye Earl is a funeral for all the “Earls” out there—the abusive men who think they can get away with anything, but are wrong—and a celebration of enduring sisterhood.

Set in contemporary Louisville, Leesa Cross-Smith’s mesmerizing first novel surrounding the death of a police officer is a requiem for marriage, friendship and family. Evi—a classically-trained ballerina—was nine months pregnant when her husband Eamon was killed in the line of duty on a steamy morning in July. Now, it is winter, and Eamon's adopted brother Dalton has moved in to help her raise six-month-old Noah. Whiskey & Ribbons is told in three intertwining, melodic voices: Evi in present day, as she’s snowed in with Dalton during a freak blizzard; Eamon before his murder, as he prepares for impending fatherhood and grapples with the danger of his profession; and Dalton, as he struggles to make sense of his life next to Eamon’s, and as he decides to track down the biological father he’s never known. In the vein of Jojo Moyes’ After You, Whiskey & Ribbons explores the life that continues beyond loss, with a complicated brotherly dynamic reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout’s The Burgess Boys. It’s a meditation on grief, hope, motherhood, brotherhood and surrogate fatherhood. Above all, it’s a novel about what it means—and whether it’s possible—to heal.

An irresistible story of a woman remaking her life after her husband’s betrayal leads to a year of travel, art, and passion in Paris, from the award-winning author of This Close to Okay.   Vincent, having grown up as the privileged daughter of artists, has a lovely life in many ways. At forty-four, she enjoys strolling the streets of Paris and teaching at the modern art museum; she has a vibrant group of friends; and she’s even caught the eye of a young, charismatic man named Loup. But Vincent is also in Paris to escape a painful betrayal: her husband, Cillian, has published a bestselling book divulging secrets about their marriage and his own past, hinting that when he was a teenager, he may have had a child with a young woman back in Dublin—before he moved to California and never returned.   Now estranged from her husband, Vincent has agreed to see Cillian again at their son’s wedding the following summer, but Loup introduces new complications. Soon they begin an intense affair, and somewhere between dinners made together, cigarettes smoked in the moonlight, hazy evenings in nightclubs, and long, starry walks along the Seine, Vincent feels herself loosening and blossoming.   In a journey that is both transportive and intimate, Half-Blown Rose traverses Paris, art, travel, liminal spaces, and the messy complexities of relationships and romance, with excerpts from Cillian’s novel, playlists, and journal entries woven throughout. As Cillian does all he can to win her back, Vincent must decide what she wants . . . and who she will be.