March 11, 2025 from EastOver Press
Pre-order now at Bookshop, Amazon, or your local bookstore.
The stories in Kim Magowan and Michelle Ross’s collection are sharp-toothed, playful, trippy introspections on the mundane insanity of office-life, the gluey-soup of dating, the casual cruelty of childhood. This collection explores the grimy underbelly of what it means to be human—raw and honest, real and revelatory. Each story is a geode waiting to be cracked open. We couldn’t say it better than the very first story in the collection: ‘Enjoy! It’s a command.’
— Dana Diehl and Melissa Goodrich, authors of The Classroom
Kim Magowan and Michelle Ross have created a smart and hilarious masterpiece of a collection. If you want to laugh out loud, this is the book to read; every sentence is a delight. Two heads are absolutely better than one if those heads are Ross and Magowan’s. Don’t Take This the Wrong Way is insanely good in every possible way.
— Louise Marburg, author of You Have Reached Your Destination
How lucky we are to have this new collection from Kim Magowan and Michelle Ross, two of our best writers of short-form fiction. These stories are resonant and layered, nuanced and generous, each one packing a novel’s worth of insight and wisdom and gifting us with glimpses into the rich interior lives of their characters. Building these stories together, Ross and Magowan have written us a wonder!
— Chrissy Kolaya, author of Charmed Particles
Writing stories has never been an exact science, but what a formula these two authors have used to create this perfect chemistry, an ideal compound synthesized from their individual elements. Magowan and Ross lend their unique voices and perspectives to make Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, an amalgamation of the highest order, a wondrous and tragic and hysterical collection that employs each writer’s vision, resulting in something new, something considerable. Two of today’s best short story writers have collaborated to create one of the story collections of the year.
— Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze
Each story in Don’t Take This the Wrong Way strikes like an elegant weapon, quick and sharp enough to take your breath away. The flash stories are masterclasses in the genre, showcasing the authors’ talent for achieving precision without sacrificing complexity, and the longer stories are delightfully inventive. A triumph from beginning to end, these are stories whose impact far exceeds their length.
— Gwen Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw
Order now from Gold Wake Press, your local independent bookstore, or from Bookshop. Signed copies are available at Folio Books in San Francisco.
From 7.13 Books
Order from your local independent bookstore or Bookshop.
The relationship between Heather Katchadourian and Julie Howe is complicated. Over the past two decades, they’ve been just about everything to each other: boarding school roommates, best friends, lovers, rivals, even co-parents—both together and estranged. Will they find their way back to each other, or have they inflicted too much damage along the way? Reminiscent of the work of Meg Wolitzer, and narrated by Heather, Julie, their lifelong friends, partners, and children, The Light Source is a prismatic portrayal of what everlasting modern love truly looks like and reminds us that what’s meant-to-be becomes harder to define with age.
“A deeply honest, emotional powerhouse of a debut by Kim Magowan, The Light Source is told through the individual voices of boarding school friends whose lives and relationships interweave and unravel by turns. At its core, two women share a fragile, complicated love marred by denial and betrayal. It is because Magowan’s people are so real, so flawed and funny and smart and hurting, that they compel us so. This novel brilliantly and movingly demonstrates the power of forgiveness and self-acceptance, and that which we so often forget: How by opening the one door we’ve always stubbornly refused to, we are at last rewarded with light.”
~ Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018
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Kim Magowan’s 2018 collection of short stories, Undoing, won the Moon City Short Fiction Award. To order it from the publisher, click HERE. Or, order from Bookshop.
In Kim Magowan’s aptly titled debut short-story collection, Undoing, characters are frequently caught with their eyes on the past, trying to discern where it all went wrong, whether that concerns a marriage that survives infidelity only to fade later into oblivion or the premature termination of an affair.
“Burgeoning clouds of longing and desire cast shadows across the young characters’ in Kim Magowan’s debut collection, darkening their features, leaving them exposed and illuminating their innermost identities in flashes of literary lightning. Alternatingly forlorn and hopeful, these jeweled stories bristle with transgression, seduction and a frisson of transcendent possibility.”
– Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master’s Son and Fortune Smiles.
A young girl hopes to make sense of her seduction by the father of the child she babysits, while a new wife surveys her youthful indiscretions for clues as to how to forge an emotional bond with her anorexic stepdaughter. Through it all, struggles become universal, perhaps inevitable. Characters often reappear: older, wiser, seeking to break the cycle of dysfunction. The ultimate effect is a feeling of community, of shared mistakes, leaving the individuals lonely but not alone.
In this way, Magowan’s collection moves well beyond reflection. Ignoring the wreckage of their respective pasts, her characters are willing to look ahead, to try again. Indeed, there is much pain and lasting harm to go around, but these are curious, resilient people, open to the idea that the solutions, not just the problems, lie within. They hope, despite much evidence to the contrary, that they can undo what has been done.
Kim Magowan 