Peach Pit

Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women

By Alison Rumfitt, Megan Giddings, Vanessa Chan, and more

2023

First Published

3.55

Average Rating

253

Number of Pages

7H30M

Audio Length

A stunning anthology of fierce and dangerous women, featuring stories from Lauren Groff, Deesha Philyaw, K-Ming Chang, and thirteen other award-winning and bestselling authors A middle-aged Black woman exacts revenge on the aggressively average men she meets on dating sites. A girl buries pieces of herself in a hole beneath an apple tree, hoping to escape her mother’s life of struggle and servitude. A group of teenage girls compete for the title of "Worst Girl in America.” A young woman in Taiwan becomes infatuated with a female scam caller, a fleeting ghost of a love that blossoms from strangeness. And a wealthy woman goes to unconventional, and perhaps not entirely ethical, lengths to find her dream man. In these sixteen stories, we see women at their most monstrous—as con artists and murderers, cutthroats and scalpers, ruled by ambition and grief and spite. Characters for those tired of being told to play nice. Dressed to the nines in morally gray, the stories in this anthology comprise an envelope full of teeth: each one distinct, unsettling, and sharp enough to rip out a throat.

Avg Rating

3.55

Number of Ratings

743

5 STARS

16%

4 STARS

38%

3 STARS

35%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Authors

Alison Rumfitt

Author · 6 books

Alison Rumfitt is a woman in trouble. She lives and works in Brighton, and writes deeply personal, transgressive horror.

Vanessa Chan is the Malaysian author of The Storm We Made, coming January 2024 from Marysue Rucci Books/Simon & Schuster (US), Hodder & Stoughton (UK), and 20+ languages. Her short stories have been published in Electric Lit, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, and more. She loves to read (of course), but also really loves TV, spicy food, and brightly colored clothes.

Maisy Card is a writer and a librarian. Her debut novel, These Ghosts are Family, won an American Book Award, the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize in Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, The Center For Fiction's First Novel Prize, and an Audie Award in the Literary Fiction & Classics category. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review's "The Daily," The New York Times, Lenny Letter, AGNI, Guernica, and other publications. Maisy was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, but was raised in Queens, New York. She earned an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College, an MLS from Rutgers University. She is currently an instructor for the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop and a fiction editor for The Brooklyn Rail.

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the debut novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her short story collection, GODS OF WANT, is forthcoming from One World.

Sarah Rose Etter

Author · 4 books

Sarah Rose Etter is the author of Tongue Party, and The Book of X, winner of a Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel. Her second novel, RIPE, is forthcoming from Scribner in July 2023. Her work has appeared in Time, Guernica, BOMB, The Bennington Review, The Cut, VICE, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residences at the Jack Kerouac House, the Disquiet International program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan Writing Residency in Iceland. She earned her BA in English from Pennsylvania State University and her MFA in fiction from Rosemont College. She lives in Los Angeles. For more info, visit SarahRoseEtter.com.

Chana Porter

Author · 3 books

Chana Porter, writes the NY Times, “uses incongruity and exaggeration to suggest some midnight-dark truths about human life and endeavor.” She is an emerging playwright, speculative novelist, and education activist. Her plays have been developed or produced at The Flea Theater, Playwrights Horizons, The Catastrophic Theatre, La MaMa, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, Cherry Lane, The Invisible Dog, & Movement Research. Houston Press writes “Porter’s type of risky storytelling is, well…. like a lion’s roar in an all too often timid jungle.” She is a MacDowell Fellow, a New Georges Audrey Resident, a Target Margin Artist-in-Residence, and the recipient of Honorable Mention for the Relentless Prize. She is currently writer-in-residence at The Catastrophic Theatre in Houston. Chana is the co-founder of the Octavia Project, a free summer writing and STEM program for Brooklyn teenage girls and non-binary youth. She has taught her embodied creativity course Writing from the Body at University of Houston, Fordham University, Hampshire College, Goddard College, Weber State, and with Sarah Lawrence’s Global Classroom. Her debut novel, The Seep, is forthcoming from Soho Press in 2020.

Deesha Philyaw

Author · 4 books

Deesha Philyaw's collection of short stories about Black women, sex, and the Black church, THE SECRET LIVES OF CHURCH LADIES is forthcoming from West Virginia University Press in Sept. 1, 2020. Deesha is the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Her work has been listed as Notable in the Best American Essays series, and her writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Brevity, dead housekeeping, Apogee Journal, Catapult, Cheat River Review, TueNight, ESPN’s The Undefeated and The Baltimore Review; Essence, Ebony, and Bitch magazines; and various anthologies. Deesha is a Fellow at the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction and a past Pushcart Prize nominee for essay writing in Full Grown People.

Lauren Groff

Author · 16 books

Lauren Groff was born in Cooperstown, N.Y. and grew up one block from the Baseball Hall of Fame. She graduated from Amherst College and has an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Hobart, and Five Points as well as in the anthologies Best American Short Stories 2007, Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best New American Voices 2008. She was awarded the Axton Fellowship in Fiction at the University of Louisville, and has had residencies and fellowships at Yaddo and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband, Clay, and her dog, Cooper.

Alice Ash

Author · 2 books

Alice Ash is a new writer from Brighton, UK. Alice's debut collection, Paradise Block, is out now, and her first novel will follow in 2024. Paradise Block won the Edge Hill Readers Prize 2021. @aliceash_

Amanda Leduc

Author · 5 books

Amanda Leduc is the author of the novel THE CENTAUR'S WIFE (Random House Canada, 2021) and the non-fiction book DISFIGURED: ON FAIRY TALES, DISABILITY, AND MAKING SPACE (Coach House Books, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Governor General’s Award in Nonfiction and longlisted for the 2020 Barbellion Prize. She is also the author of an earlier novel, THE MIRACLES OF ORDINARY MEN (ECW Press, 2013). She has cerebral palsy and lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she serves as the Communications Coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), Canada's first festival for diverse authors and stories.

Alicia Elliott

Author · 3 books