Feeding Strays: Short Stories by Stefanie Freele came out in August, and if you haven’t already bought it, do so now. The collection has been praised by Gayle Brandeis, Bellweather Prize-winning author of The Book of Dead Birds, Self Storage, and Fruitflesh, Deb Olin Unferth, and Benjamin Percy. Wow!

Here is the publisher’s blurb about the book:

A woman hides from her husband in a fish tank and another absently bakes sponges inside her tarts. Appliances drop from the sky, men grapple with chainsaws, women struggle with hormonal violence, and abandoned boys beg on doorsteps. Enter into the territory of broken people and the folks that love them. Sensitive and unruly, sincere and absurd, Stefanie Freele’s Feeding Strays is a collection of fifty short stories, both slipstream and modern, about children, family, relationships, and oysters.

Stefanie won the 2008 Kathy Fish Fellowship at SmokeLong Quarterly, where she is now an editor. She is also the fiction editor of the Los Angeles Review. Visit Stefanie’s website for more info about her. You can also purchase the collection from there, or by going to Lost Horse Press.