by NICHOLAS TRIOLO
In Megan Mayhew Bergman’s new book of short stories, How Strange a Season, you will find a man lashed to a dock and screaming for repentance as a hurricane approaches. You will find hedge fund executives bashing in cars at the behest of a dominatrix.
A peach farm hangs on by a drought-ridden thread. The Strangler is hiding in your closet. All seven stories, and one novella, traverse critical questions about power, fidelity, and landscape, and the troubled humans who live in them. How Strange a Season offers an “evocative and engrossing collection of new stories and a novella about women experiencing life’s challenges and beauty.”
Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of Almost Famous Women and Birds of a Lesser Paradise. Her short fiction has appeared in two volumes of The Best American Short Stories and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She has written columns on climate change and the natural world for The Guardian and The Paris Review. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Oxford American, and elsewhere. She teaches literature and environmental writing at Middlebury College, where she also serves as director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She lives on a small farm in Vermont.
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