Catapult

Selected by Ben Marcus as winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction'Fridlund writes of families, marriage, and childhood as if our received wisdom-what we thought we knew about life and love and family-needs reparation. This is fiction as excavation, peeling away the machinery of people and converting it to narrative. Fridlund shines a spotlight on what gets hidden and unreported, and the result can be overwhelming-cutting and funny and filled with difficult truth' Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet Sometimes calculating, at other times bewildered, Catapult's characters orbit around each other, enacting a deeply human tragicomedy of wit, misunderstanding, and loss. With dexterous, atmospheric, and darkly comic prose, Fridlund conjures worlds where longing is open-ended, intentions misfire, and the line between comfort and cruelty is often difficult to discern. This is a gripping collection, unsettling as much in its familiarity as in its near-gothic strangeness.