Eight titles exploring the transgressions of young women

Alanna Schubach is a fiction writer, freelance journalist, and teacher. Her debut novel, The Nobodies, is now out from Blackstone.

She was named a NYC Emerging Writers Fellow with the Center for Fiction in 2019, and a Fellow in Fiction with the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2015. Her short stories have appeared in Shenandoah, the Sewanee Review, the Massachusetts Review, Electric Literature, and more, and she has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

Schubach teaches fiction and non-fiction for the Gotham Writers Workshop and privately mentors students in creative writing.

At CrimeReads Schubach tagged eight favorite "tales of young women overstepping boundaries, not only committing crimes in the traditional sense, but also transgressing against expectations in other ways, as well." One title on the list:

Sorority, by Genevieve Sly Crane

“Girls are cruelest to themselves,” the poet Anne Carson wrote. There’s plenty of cruelty in these linked stories about the women of one sorority house, directed both at each other and themselves, particularly after the death of one of their sisters. And each sister has her say about the incident in a series of first-person narratives, presenting a kaleidoscopic and nuanced view that goes well beyond the stereotypes of Greek life. There’s hazing, to be sure, but Crane also takes us inside the inner lives of the sisters, from the house’s founders who warded off marauding men during the Civil War with mysterious rituals, to the present-day members who cope with fractured relationships, clandestine romances, dark compulsions, and all the complexities and dangers of young womanhood.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue