Description
Sinners to the Back of the House (Inch #63)
by Emily Hoover
Sinners to the Back of the House is a step forward, an opportunity to reimagine hero stories. These spare stories expand, like lungs in the body, to reveal the strength it takes, especially for women-identifying folx, to leave partnerships, families, jobs, and realities that no longer serve them. If you’re coming to terms with what it means to abandon outdated and dangerous narratives and to stand at last in your power, you’ll find a version of yourself in Sinners to the Back of the House.
by Marianne Gingher (Greensboro, NC)
A bride on her honeymoon eats her husband; a young boy’s dreams materialize to save him from bullies; a daughter recalls a family vacation that felt more like a kidnapping; a feral cat identifies with an unruly girl whose father attempts to isolate and tame her. In Shiny Girl (Inch #60), relationships evolve or devolve, as quickly as a match struck and blown out, and love mostly remains aspirational: as trial, magic trick, prison, or the fairy tale one wants to believe. The stories that happen to both humans and animals are arranged chronologically (youth to old age), focusing on characters who, though often self-sabotaging, are ultimately insightful and resilient. Whatever their impediments and diminished circumstances, these characters find ways to persist and bloom, sometimes through insight and pluck, sometimes because of the fairy tales they tell themselves or attempt to live.
by Sara Potocsny
Includes the stories: At Wegmans, Which Is Your Kroger, Which Is My Friend; The Hotel; Teen Squirrels; Last Queer on Earth; Amy and Tick; Frozen Pigeon; Biscuits; Dozer.
by Elane Kim
Postcards is a collection of stories about finding home in strange places: an old poolside, a fish market, a frame of the ocean, a language that does not love you back. It is an acknowledgement of loss, of hope, and of the spaces in between. Postcards is a reminder that you will never be more here than you are now, that inside every story is a home.
by Despy Boutris
The stories in Despy Boutris’ Burials represent a contemporary queering of the “rural Gothic”: a coming-of-age narrative that interrogates familial relationships, abuse, grief, guilt, trauma, and sexuality, in a pastoral landscape that can be tender and nostalgic and yet threatening underneath. The trials and tribulations of girlhood in a small town are complicated further as the narrator explores her sapphic desires—but what begins with secrecy in the narrator transforms into a space of solace and safety, and a refusal to be silenced or ignored within a heteronormative society. With rich and emotive prose that carries the sonic texture and rhythmic cadence of poetry, Despy Boutris expertly weaves a powerful account of the ache and awe of adolescence.
by K-Ming Chang
Bone House is a queer Taiwanese-American micro-retelling of Wuthering Heights, a love story and a ghost story simultaneously – it revolves around a young woman named Millet, who is of unidentifiable lineage, and her destructive romance with Cathy Chiu, modeled after Cathy from the original novel. As our unnamed narrator moves into Bone House, a butcher’s mansion with a life of its own, she finds herself haunted by Cathy’s unrelenting ghost, while also becoming ensnared in her own attraction to Millet. All three women come to understand that their histories are inextricable and cyclical, and that they are bound together by desire and violence.
by Erica Soon Olsen
Includes the stories “Girlmine,” “The Iron Ranger,” “Daphne: Alternative Metamorphoses, While Fleeing Apollo,” “The Emigrants,” “Daphne: The Aspen Version,” and “Assimilation, Sunset Park.”
by Stephanie Lane Sutton
Includes the stories “All Apologies to the Royal Poinciana,” “Beginning My Life as a Clam,” “Shiny Insect Sex,” “The Shy Male Seahorse Aborts for Me,” “Last Night, I Had an American Dream,” “Survival Town, USA,” “On My Desert Island,” and “How to Clean a Fish.”
Inch is a magazine devoted to bringing you the smallest poems and the shortest fiction in a tiny package. From 2006-2018, each issue was an anthology of brevity & concision by some of the most talented writers. Beginning in 2019, Inch began focusing on the work of a single author in each issue. In 2020, as old issues of Inch began to fall out of print we chose to preserve these small gems—issues 1-37—as three eBook collections.
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