Stitch

Allison Field Bell’s debut flash fiction collection careens through California, Utah, Indiana, and the Southwest. In these stories, a woman transforms herself into a statue, two friends are suspended in a moment of grief, a video game date sours, a backyard bonfire turns abusive. There’s the eve of election night, an amusement park, an oak tree, a fire.

Here, woman is a new kind of creature where danger is the thread that connects one life to the next. Where refusal, acceptance, and hunger are bound together in a natural, insatiable order. The book demands to know this of womanhood, of personhood: how much can one body hold? And what, if anything, are we willing to let go of?

Filled with waves of sensuality, of rage, of grief, of envy, Stitch will plunge you into the depths of these small but powerful stories. Let Allison Field Bell lure you in with a yes, with a moonrise, with a silver thread, capture you with recklessness, with adoration, with want, finally leaving you breathless with pain and, most importantly, with hope.

—Melissa Llanes Brownlee, author of Bitter Over Sweet and Hard Skin

Allison Field Bell’s Stitch threads together an unflinching collection of small fictions that trace the body as battleground, sanctuary, and inheritance. In stories ranging from realist to speculative, Field Bell moves between the tender and the brutal in incantatory prose that is at once lyric and spare. These stories eschew easy comfort, choosing instead to interrogate the mess of longing, loss, and survival. Ultimately Stitch is a collection about what women carry in their bodies, what is buried and what refuses to stay buried.

—Sarah Freligh, author of Other Emergencies

Stitch feels like a collection of newborn birds cradled in the palms of caring yet unsteady hands. There is an intimacy and a deep fragility in these stories that is buoyed against immense beauty. Field Bell demonstrates a mastery of restraint and language that demands she be a name and a force to be reckoned with in the flash fiction world!

—Eric Scot Tryon, author of I'm the Undertow

Yes is what comes to mind when reading Stitch by Allison Field Bell. Yes to romance. Yes to grief. Yes to rebellion. Yes to longing and being alone and falling apart everywhere and all at once. Stitch is a culmination of the fragility of relationships. A depiction of love, the loss of a stranger, and every undefinable emotion in between. A collection of flash that will leave readers tracing every memory found within these pages and the stitchings that bind them.

—Avitus B. Carle, author of These Worn Bodies

Perhaps no writer today is better at capturing pain and longing as eloquently and concisely as Allison Field Bell. This mini-collection of her flash exhibits a preternatural understanding of just what it means to be human, even if that human happens to be a tree. I loved every story, feeling every pulse, every desire, every tear in every one of these characters' hearts.

—Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze