Cosmonauts Avenue, New Orleans Review, and Monkeybicycle. Her work has also appeared on the longlist for Wigleaf’s Top 50, and her essays and literary criticism have been featured in the Chicago Review of Books and on the Ploughshares blog. Davis’s most recent piece of flash fiction, “The Babysitter,” was selected as a finalist for the Mythic Picnic Prize for Fiction and appears in The Best Small Fictions 2022.
In A Dark Mirror is her debut novel.
At Electric Lit Davis tagged ten feminist crime novels subverting the Dead Girl trope, including:
Women Talking by Miriam ToewsRead about the other entries on the list.
Unlikesome of the books on this list, Toews novel has no surprise twists or sudden reveals. It is, almost entirely, a book about women talking—and it is riveting.The novel is based on the case of so-called “ghost rapes” among women in a Mennonite community in Bolivia, who woke up to find their bodies bruised, their sheets stained with blood and semen—and no memory of what had happened to them. At the beginning of Women Talking, the men responsible—who used horse tranquilizers to knock out their victims—are about to be released and to return to the community. Within the patriarchal structure of their traditional community, the women’s choices are limited: do they stay and forgive these men, stay and fight, or do they leave? The women themselves are illiterate and their conversation is recorded by a sympathetic young man who was spent some time outside of the colony. Toews’s examines the aftermath of sexual assault and questions of justice in an understated literary style that is also, at times, surprisingly funny.
Women Talking is among Sarah Davis-Goff's six books about women working together, Amanda Montei's seven novels that explore consent and coercion, and Anjanette Delgado's seven books for when your life has radically changed.
--Marshal Zeringue
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