Thanks for This Riot: Stories (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction)

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction
Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection

Thanks for This Riot explores the limits of kindness, the weight of being needed, and the fear of being misunderstood. A group counselor is taunted by a truth-divining piano bench, a voice actor shouts her abortion at the state capitol, a tired caregiver tangles with a pair of stand-up comics, a small-town newspaper office shelters an otherworldly tattletale, a backwoods acupuncturist leans on her least-exciting offspring, a girl in a strapless bra takes a vengeful go-kart ride, and a woman gets surgery to lower her expectations (she thinks it went “okay”). Grouped by types of riot—external riots, internal riots, and laugh riots—Thanks for This Riot is a poignant and mordantly funny collection with a distinctly feminist viewpoint.



 

Janelle Bassett’s writing appears or is forthcoming in the Rumpus, Indiana Review, Smokelong Quarterly, American Literary Review, the Offing, Washington Square Review, Wigleaf, and Best Microfiction 2023. She lives in Saint Louis and is a fiction editor at Split Lip Magazine.