First Fiction 2020

In our twentieth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, Lauren Groff, Bryan Washington, Paul Lisicky, Sue Monk Kidd, and Sarah Gailey introduce first books by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, Jean Kyoung Frazier, Corinne Manning, Megha Majumdar, and John Fram.

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Ashleigh Bryant Phillips whose debut story collection, Sleepovers, was published in June by Hub City Press.

INTRODUCED BY

Lauren Groff author of five books, most recently Florida, published by Riverhead Books in 2018.

ONLY a few sentences into the first story in Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’s brilliant debut collection, Sleepovers, I understood that I was holding something like a live wire in my hands: dangerous, potent, with an astonishing power to illuminate. I hadn’t even set it down before I knew it would win the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, for which I was the 2019 judge.

The very short stories in the collection move in the same corner of rural North Carolina where Phillips is from, each story painting its own vivid vision so that, by the end of the book, through specificity and some sort of dazzling wizardry, the place rises up like a living hallucination around the reader. This is a world in which dressed-up taxidermied squirrels become a window into a better life, where prayers about the unspeakable build until they nearly burst, where girls dream themselves into does. Sleepovers is a first book by a wild, true talent.