Our Sister Who Will Not Die: Stories,
Rebecca Bernard’s debut collection of stories, won the 2021 Non/Fiction prize from
The Journal and was published by
Ohio State’s Mad Creek Books in August 2022. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in
Alaska Quarterly Review,
Southwest Review,
Wigleaf,
Witness, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Fiction from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Vanderbilt University. Her work received notable mention in the Best American Short Stories of 2018. She is an Assistant Professor in the English department at Angelo State University. She serves as a Fiction Editor for
The Boiler.
At Lit Hub Bernard tagged seven of the best complex portraits of criminality in literature, including:
Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room
Kushner weaves a complex, moving, and empathic narrative that challenges our assumptions of criminality and simultaneously exposes the gross inequities within the prison system. The primary first-person point of view follows Romy, a 20-
something woman convicted of murdering her stalker as she begins a life sentence within the California prison system. On paper, Romy, a sex worker and a single mother, might elicit a dehumanizing dismissal, but Kushner puts us directly in her shoes, privy to the complex workings of her mind (and importantly, Romy is new to the system alongside the reader). The real magic in Kushner’s narrative comes through the bold offering of multiple close-third person viewpoints alongside Romy that include an incarcerated former policeman, one of Romy’s peers in prison, Sammy, and the teacher of the prison GED program. With each perspective, we see more deeply into the character’s actions, both their capacity to hurt others, as well as their methods for survival in a society and system that rarely protects its most disenfranchised members from the gross and far-reaching effects of poverty and abuse. Daring in its empathic reach, this book enforces the idea that no individual holds all parts of a story, and we’re better for the humility that awareness brings.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
Ohio State’s Mad Creek Books in August 2022. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Wigleaf, Witness, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Fiction from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Vanderbilt University. Her work received notable mention in the Best American Short Stories of 2018. She is an Assistant Professor in the English department at Angelo State University. She serves as a Fiction Editor for The Boiler.
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