Jerks

With Jerks, Sara Lippmann rides the proverbial clutch between wanting and having. Ambivalent mothers, aging suburbanites, restless teens, survivalist parents, and disaffected wives—desire is a live wire, however frayed; a reminder that life, for all its sputtering stall outs, is still worth living. The messy characters in these eighteen stories may hack up their bedsheets with group sex, anonymous sex, infidelity, and a literal handsaw, but there's tenderness, too, among the lust and rage. With crisp precision, ample honesty and desperate humor, Lippmann delivers an irresistibly fraught cast of characters at various stages of undress.

SARA LIPPMANN is the author of the novel Lech and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. Her fiction has won the Lilith Fiction Prize and has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she co-edited the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible from SUNY Press. She is a co-founder of Writing Co-lab, an artist-run online teaching cooperative, and the editor-in-chief of Epiphany magazine. Her new novel, Hidden River, will be published by Tortoise Books in 2026. She lives in Brooklyn.