Storyknife

A Paperback Original

A sharply constructed, death-defying story collection that dismantles the myths of white America, revealing race, class, and gender as fictions that can be taken apart and remade

In his first story collection in fifteen years, Jess Row evokes white America—specifically liberal, educated white Northeasterners—awkwardly and hilariously poised on the precipice of cultural and global collapse.

In “The Empties,” a woman questions whether the writing skills she acquired at liberal arts college can be useful in the face of apocalypse. In “Summer Song,” a chorus of bourgeois voices sings out its privileged discontent. “Reading Group Guide” satirizes book-club chatter with questions that veer from the absurd to the obscene. Each story turns a lens on its own machinery, exposing the quiet politics encoded in literary convention. Using surgical precision, biting irony, and formal experimentation, Row pierces through the stories white America tells itself—and the narrative structures that make them seem natural, inevitable, and true.

Storyknife is a funny, troubling, indelible look at a culture whose rituals and expectations are dissolving into thin air.

JESS ROW is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine, the essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, and two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. He’s received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award; his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, and many other publications. He teaches at NYU and lives in New York City and Plainfield, Vermont.