The Falls of Us: A Compilation of Short Stories

Literary Titan Silver Book Award Winner

A religious community calls an abused teenage girl the sinner—and asks her father to agree.

A woman insists she murdered her husband, though the evidence contradicts her confession.

A sentence is handed down for forgetting to say “Yes, Ma’am.”

And in a society that demands women’s silence, speaking out means being silenced forever.

In The Falls of Us: A Compilation of Short Stories, E. M. Fowler brings together eighteen stories—from microfiction and flash fiction to longer short stories—centered on Black characters navigating betrayal, manipulation, faith, and the judgments that follow private pain. A mother quietly severs the bond between a father and daughter. An aging woman moves through the shifting reality of dementia. A marriage strains beneath what its partners cannot—or will not—face.

Blending literary prose with unsettling speculative twists, these stories explore who gets believed, whose suffering becomes shame, and what people conceal to survive.

The hardest part is not always what happened. Sometimes it is what comes after.