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Unveiling Secrets: A Tapestry of Women’s Lives in New Short Story Collections
About the Authors & Their Books: The 18 sensual, richly compelling stories of Ladies, Ladies, Ladies, including the Pushcart-nominated "A Fine Girl," are candid tales of searching and survival written in an intimate style of prose that feels like whispers over wine. Each piece of micro-fiction is told from the point of view of a different ‘lady’ and as a whole, allows the reader to experience a tapestry of lives crafted from small, poetic moments that conjure magic from the everyday—a strand of hair dipped in ice cream, the hum of music through a car, a sunset on the belly of a cat. Ladies, Ladies, Ladies is the debut short story collection by Kristen Zory King that, according to author Sara Lippmann (LECH, Jerks, Doll Palace), “leaves us with a steadfast, feminist imperative: ‘You don’t need to stay sewn to your shadow. Fight hook and crook for this life of yours.’”
Kristen Zory King is a writer based in Washington, DC. Recent work can be found in Electric Lit, The Citron Review, and HAD, among other publications. Her chapbook of vignettes, Ladies, Ladies, Ladies was released with Stanchion in February 2025 and she is currently at work on a project exploring vocation, creativity, and the human spirit. In addition to her work on the page, Kris is also a creative teaching artist, yoga and Pilates instructor, and graduate student at George Mason University. Learn more, join a workshop, or be in touch at www.KristenZoryKing.com.
A strange and sinister debut from Stephen Dixon Award-winning author Kristina Ten
The new kid in school discovers a diabolical presence in the depths of an English-language-learning CD-ROM. A desperate and declining empire designs an elaborate matchmaking system around cootie catchers and soda-can tabs. A former varsity volleyball player reopens the grisly wounds of her youth, haunted by a lost friend. In each story, the game has been twisted. In each game, players must make their own rules. Through a bloody, shattered lens, the artifacts of growing up take on a new and disquieting power—riddles remain unsolved, pranks have perilous stakes, and superstitions won’t save you.
Populated by living paper dolls, summer camp legends, and trivia nights gone terribly wrong, the twelve genre-crossing tales in Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine wrestle with themes of memory, disobedience, alienation, belonging, and the horrors of inhabiting a body others seek to control.
Kristina Ten’s stories appear in McSweeney's, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We're Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, Nightmare, Lightspeed, Uncanny, and elsewhere. She has won the McSweeney's Stephen Dixon Award for Short Fiction, the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award, and the F(r)iction Writing Contest, and was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Locus Award. Ten is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and the University of Colorado Boulder's MFA program in fiction, and was a 2024 Ragdale writer-in-residence. Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is her debut collection.
In this richly atmospheric, dark academia debut novel, a young woman with a secretive past will risk everything—including her life—to fit in.
Belles never tell…
It’s 1951 at the secluded Bellerton College, and Deena Williams is an outsider doing her best to blend in with her wealthy and perfectly groomed peers. Infamous for its strict rules as much as its prestige, attending Bellerton could give Deena the comfortable life she’s always dreamed of.
She quickly forms an alliance with the five other freshmen on her floor, and soon they are singled out by the president’s wife as the most promising girls of their class, who anoints them: The Belles. They walk the college’s halls in menacing unison, matching velvet ribbons in their hair. But no sisterhood comes without secrets, and the Belles are no exception. Playing cruel pranks on their dormitory housemother and embarking on boundary-shattering night games, the Belles test the limits of the campus rules.
But as Deena begins to piece together the sinister history of Bellerton, her own past threatens to come to light, forcing her to make a dangerous choice. A chilling and seductive coming-of-age story, The Belles is an excavation of the dark side of girlhood, the intricacies of privilege, and the unbridled desire to belong at any cost.
Lacey N. Dunham’s novel The Belles is forthcoming from Atria / Simon & Schuster in fall 2025. She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and Catapult. Her writing has been published in PlAoughshares, Kenyon Review, Witness, and elsewhere. Born and raised on a small family farm, she now lives in Washington, DC with too many books and only two cats.
