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9781938603938_FC.jpg

Greyhounds by Emma Smith-Stevens

$17.95

In poignant and vigorous prose, Greyhounds follows characters driven by their fiercest impulses—navigating obsession and control, lust and longing, and a desperate hunger for intimacy and connection.

A couple buys a Betta fish in the hopes it will solve their marital problems. A young girl, envious of her friend’s terminal illness, begins fabricating symptoms of her own. Catalyzed by guilt and unnameable desire, a husband and wife begin to drive incessantly, months after hitting a teenage boy with their car. And while her widowed neighbor watches, a woman who has long struggled with hoarding finds her life transformed when she begins accumulating greyhounds.

Grappling with identity crises, sexual revelations, and secrets both tender and ruinous, Smith-Stevens’s debut short story collection invites readers to reckon with the familiar through a kaleidoscopic lens—a captivating collection for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Marie-Helene Bertino.

Publication Date: October 27, 2026
Paperback
ISBN: 9781938603938

In poignant and vigorous prose, Greyhounds follows characters driven by their fiercest impulses—navigating obsession and control, lust and longing, and a desperate hunger for intimacy and connection.

A couple buys a Betta fish in the hopes it will solve their marital problems. A young girl, envious of her friend’s terminal illness, begins fabricating symptoms of her own. Catalyzed by guilt and unnameable desire, a husband and wife begin to drive incessantly, months after hitting a teenage boy with their car. And while her widowed neighbor watches, a woman who has long struggled with hoarding finds her life transformed when she begins accumulating greyhounds.

Grappling with identity crises, sexual revelations, and secrets both tender and ruinous, Smith-Stevens’s debut short story collection invites readers to reckon with the familiar through a kaleidoscopic lens—a captivating collection for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Marie-Helene Bertino.

Publication Date: October 27, 2026
Paperback
ISBN: 9781938603938

praise for greyhounds

"Greyhounds is a simply stunning collection. I like to be surprised; I like a good, authentic gut punch; I like a succinct sentence that makes me gasp because it’s so true and perfect; I love messy, interesting women characters. Greyhounds delivers in all these ways, in spades." –Deesha Philyaw,  author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

"I've been a fan of Emma Smith-Stevens since the publication of her novel, The Australian. She's a brave writer and gifted with the precision stylistic attack that I associate with the short-fiction renaissance of the 1980s. For these reasons, Greyhounds, her new collection of short stories, is a most welcome and satisfying thing. It digs deep on the ache of being human but likewise does not stint on the laughs that sometimes accompany this ache. I admire this book." –Rick Moody, author of The Long Accomplishment

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emma Smith-Stevens is the author of The Australian. Her writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.