The “other emergencies” experienced by Sarah Freligh’s characters range from mildly disruptive to life-altering. In “All That Water,” a college dropout struggling with addiction forges an unlikely alliance with a bank teller following a botched robbery. In “Aftershocks,” a writer grieving the loss of her support dog is haunted by the memory of what she witnessed on 9/11. In “Happenstance,” two women from different backgrounds form a tenuous connection over the shared experience of their histories. And in “Heaven,” a detective and a high school girl navigate the fraught terrain in the days following a mass shooting in a small town. Ultimately the stories in Other Emergencies revolve around the resilience of people and the capacity for authentic connection in times of great change.
Other Emergencies
$16.95
Stories by Sarah Freligh
The 2025 Moon City Press Editors Choice Selection
978-0-913785-65-2 Paper
April 2025
Sarah Freligh is the author of seven books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Award; Hereafter, winner of the 2024 Bath Novella-in-Flash contest; and A Brief Natural History of Women (Harbor Editions, 2023). Her work has appeared numerous literary journals and is anthologized in New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton, 2018), and several editions of Best Microfiction. Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts.
“As I read the sharp, compelling stories in Other Emergencies—some flash, some longer, many with recurring characters—I was struck by how few writers in America today are populating their books with the kind of people in this collection. For most of these characters, the American Dream has turned out to be an empty promise, but still, they survive. And there’s a lot to survive in this book: the gun violence that populates these stories with an all-too-realistic frequency, the grief of other losses, the constant hustle necessary to pay the bills. Sarah Freligh tells these stories with an eye for the details of small-town life, in prose that is both free of affectation yet poetic in its observations. There’s an urgency to these stories, and an underlying music that drew me in and left me wanting more. If Bruce Springsteen wrote a short story collection, I think it would be much like Other Emergencies.”
—Lisa Borders, author of Last Night at the Disco
“Freligh writes about disappointment like a luminous funhouse. These stories glow through the cracks of the crumbling American Dream. With wit and biting precision, she shows us hurt, but reminds us we’re allowed to laugh, to feel awed, and, best of all, to feel less alone in our own stumbles. Freligh is a masterful writer, who breathes such life into her wounded characters with her blazing prose.”
—Dustin M. Hoffman, author of Such a Good Man
“In this powerful collection, Freligh transforms the cold, windswept Great Lakes region and its hardworking people into bright, unexpected “prickly glitter.” With her trademark tenacity and verbal finesse, she confronts the dark perils of American culture—mass shootings, rising crime, political corruption—and distills them down to miniature moments of consequence. A master stylist of vibrant, concise prose, her sentences zing with beauty and grit. Freligh’s wry sense of humor make us root for these slightly off-kilter, resilient characters.”
—Anne Panning, author of Super America
“In stories rife with bitter heartbreak, senseless gun violence, and bad literary agents, Sarah Freligh mines grief for humor, matching wit with sorrow and coupling anger with grace. A knock-down, drag-out collection from a singular voice.”
—David James Poissant, author of Lake Life and The Heaven of Animals
“Reading Sarah Freligh’s new, boldly big-hearted collection left me with pages of scribbled quotes (‘the air feels full of arrows’; ‘like beauty is an achievement instead of an accident’). She’s a wizard with words, creating grieving characters layered with fragility and resilience, who face life’s unexpected sorrows with sly humor and verve: ending up with the wrong cat from the boarding kennel; randomly kidnapping a bank teller; a cop reporting a teenage girl’s death as she stands next to her mother. You’re in the hands of a master here.”
—Leslie Pietrzyk, author of Admit This to No One
Distributed for Moon City Press.