My Stalkers, a new collection of short stories by Adjunct Assistant Professor Catherine Lacey '10, is set to hit shelves in January, 2027. My Stalkers (Macmillan, 2027) features nine original short stories that deal with women “becoming someone else or no one at all.”
This will be Lacey’s second short story collection, following Certain American States (Macmillan, 2018). She shared in an interview with the Harvard Gazette that writing short stories is a process driven by nature. She expressed that “When I hear poets talk about writing poems, this is like when you hear flowers talk about being flowers or something…it’s like something happens to them. And I think the story is the closest I can get to something happening to me.”
Each story tells a uniquely different tale. As shared on the Macmillan site, one follows a woman who “finds a coat that isn’t hers in the house, and its appearance sets off a chain of events that destroys her life as she knew it.” Another, radically different, examines “a mountain, one kilometer high, [which] spontaneously materializes in rural Kansas, composed entirely of semiconscious men, provoking a female amateur athlete to climb it.” Through each, Lacey zooms in on the lives of women and “reveals the disquieting and darkly humorous forces at work beneath the surface of the ordinary.”
Already, the work has received high praise. Publishers Weekly shared that My Stalkers “combines the comic absurdity and fantastical conceits of George Saunders with the cool and sardonic tone of Donald Barthelme in stories that ask what it means to have an identity and how it might be disrupted. Once again, Lacey proves she’s a consummate stylist.”
Lacey is the author of the novels Biography of X, Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere.
