About

The Last Day explores endings: endings of love affairs, friendships, childhood, and rivalries, endings being occasions for mourning, celebration, and recovery all at the same time. Kim Magowan’s newest collection pinpoints the moments when everything changes, when endings become beginnings and the future starts anew.

Author

Kim Magowan is the author of the novel The Light Source and three previous short story collections: Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, co-authored with Michelle Ross, How Far I’ve Come, and Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. She lives in San Francisco with her family and teaches in the English Department of Mills College at Northeastern University.

Praise

“In The Last Day, every story, every character, every woman builds up pressure, quietly, until they release in an explosion of love, of loss, of contemplation, of consternation. Kim Magowan, masterfully, captures these moments in the Golden Gate Park, in a diner serving Chinese food and donuts, in the windiest neighborhood in San Francisco, in the ghostly wet spot on an apartment’s wall, in places familiar, and yet strange, revealing truths, revealing ourselves.
—Melissa Llanes Brownlee, author of Bitter Over Sweet, Kahi and Lua, and Hard Skin

“No one writes about couples as astutely and provocatively as Kim Magowan. Kim Magowan’s stories cleave—in both senses of the word. Her characters seek attachment even as they separate. And oh how they separate. Magowan dramatizes break-ups (of couples and friends), affairs, marital ennui, aging, jealousy, yearning, and the general anxiety (and sometimes joy) of love like no one else.”
—Grant Faulkner, author of All the Comfort Sin Can Provide

“The Last Day is a collection that made me cackle. With deep insight and astonishing wit, Kim Magowan explores the strange and wondrous forms familial relationships can take, often as they dissipate, but also as new bonds form. Inventive in form and piercing in wisdom, these stories are sharp, funny, and sometimes petty in the most delicious way, but there’s warmth there too and a rich understanding of human nature.”
—Allison Wyss, author of Splendid Anatomies: Stories

“’Time is viscous today,’ the narrator observes in the title story of Kim Magowan’s collection. And time is a consideration in many of the stories—how the manner and pace of its passage seem to fluctuate, how recalling an ex’s offhand social fib or the memory of three hairpins resting in a grooved soap dish may yank us, at any moment, across the years. Although thematic threads provide rapport among the stories, don’t be fooled. Each one is a compact, explosive device designed to knock the reader off-kilter in a most gratifying way.”
—Valerie Vogrin, author of Expedition and Things We’ll Need for the Coming Difficulties

Publisher

Distributed for Moon City Press.