Releasing today: Shattering Glass!

Shattering Glass, edited by Heather Graham.  (Nasty Woman Press, 16 June 2020).

(This review was originally published in Crimespree Magazine.)

After the 2016 US Federal Election, many people were shocked, angry, and disappointed. 

The largest percentage of this group was female.  Women of all ages were furious that a fraudster had been elected by a minority of the country’s population to be its leader.  

Some marched.  

Some ran for office.

One woman, Kelli Stanley, an award-winning mystery author (and someone I’m proud to call my friend), did something about it.  She gathered her like-minded friends and organized a group to which would eventually become Nasty Woman Press.  

Next month, NWP’s first anthology will be published.  Entitled Shattering Glass, it contains essays, interviews, conversations, and short fiction by over 35 well-known writers of both genders.

The theme of Shattering Glass is female empowerment, and the number of different interpretations of this theme are astonishing!  All the submissions have one other thing in common:  they are very powerful. 

Ordinarily, a book of 30-odd very short pieces would take me no more than a day or two to read, but before I even opened my ARC, I decided that I was going read more slowly than usual, and allow myself time to digest, ponder, and hopefully understand the writer’s intent. 

My favorite pieces were the interviews and conversations: Jacqueline Winspear interviewing Anne Lamott, Kelli Stanley interviewing Senator Barbara Boxer, and conversations between Cara Black and Hallie Ephron, Winspear and Rhys Bowen.

All the short stories and essays were riveting, too, but it’s difficult for me to name a favorite.  Some of them are disturbing, RachelHowzell Hall’s Down Girl, a novella in 24 pages, was so powerful that I had to take a 48-hour break to process. 

I was expecting a short story from professor and prolific author Jess Lourey, but her contribution was a very intimate and moving essay about dark times in her life (another piece that took a while to digest.

It’s very difficult to know what else to highlight. The thought-provoking essay by Valerie Plame? The fact that nearly a third of the authors are men? 

Did I mention that all of the pieces are very, very good?

Shattering Glass will be released on June 16, 2020 by Nasty Woman Press, and will be available as an e-book ($9.99), trade paperback ($19.99) and hardcover ($29.99).

All profits from the sales of Shattering Glass will be donated to Planned Parenthood.