Books
An altercation in a high school library creates unexpected and cascading consequences for a handful of students, faculty, and families across a community in this character-rich literary page-turner.
Coming June 3 2025
Set in 2015 during Obama's presidency and Trump's early candidacy, the tranquil college town of Horace, Oregon, is disrupted when white students taunt a Black student in the high school library. This incident sparks immediate repercussions that ripple through the community, affecting students, families, and faculty alike. Woody, the school's guidance counselor, finds himself thrust into the spotlight after years on the sidelines. Lark, a struggling student, grapples with the fallout as her relationships are reshaped by the incident. Stefanie, a conflicted parent, struggles to balance protecting her child with allowing him to find his own path. Friendships are strained, marriages are tested, and families face the threat of sudden violence. When tragedy strikes with the death of a student, the survivors are left grappling with the fault lines in their most intimate relationships and searching for ways to draw closer.
“Miriam Gershow has written a novel of tremendous insight, unflinching realism, and transcendent generosity. Closer will keep you up late turning pages while its vivid and complex characters take up permanent residence in your head and heart. Bravo!” —Antoine Wilson, author of Mouth To Mouth
“This novel is amazing! Post-millennial culture pays lip service to diversity, but Closer gives meaning to the term. In powerful prose vignettes that read like poems, Gershow rounds up the usual suspects—race, gender, generation, religion, income, disability, sexuality—but gives voice and perspective to characters who insist on being human—often maddeningly so.” —David Bradley, author of The Chaneysville Incident
“What plays out in a public school in Oregon in 2015—racism, harassment, bullying, preventable death—feels like a microcosm of the turmoil that’s been tearing apart our national community. This riveting, high stakes, yet subtly political novel kept me up late turning pages and will stay with me for a very long time.” —Porter Shreve, author of The End of the Book and The Obituary Writer
“Miriam Gershow’s propulsive novel, Closer, is a fearless tour-de-force of imagination and empathy. Racist bullying of interracial high school sweethearts in a liberal, majority-white university town opens the story…Serious stuff, but one of Gershow’s many gifts is writing funny, making us love the relatable characters in Closer even when they flip-flop between perceptive and clued-out, and barrel toward tragedy.” —Mary Rechner, author of Marrying Friends and Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women
“Miriam Gershow has her finger on the pulse of high school angst and the forever adolescent who resides in every one of us. Her characters are so tender, flawed, and deeply real, we can’t help but root for them as they chase the alluring spell of true love... Children of all ages will fall prey to love’s illusions in this multi-generational tragedy.” —Aimee Liu, author of Glorious Boy and Gaining
“Miriam Gershow has written a work of extraordinary breadth and depth, filled with delicious scenes of carefree teenage infatuation and middleage lust. I’m awed by Gershow’s funny and detailed rendering of the twined lives of these likable dupes, none of whom see the dark future coming until it’s too late.” — Susanna Daniel, author of Stiltsville and Sea Creatures"
“With warmth and humor, Gershow deftly navigates a tangled web of crisscrossing landmines— family, friendship, class, race, adolescence, and love. It is a combustible stew that a lesser writer might shy from, but Gershow attacks these thorny topics head on. With multidimensional, nuanced characters and gorgeous, propulsive prose, this is a story that will stay with readers long after the shocking, heart-stopping end.” —Jennifer Oko, author of Just Emilia, Lying Together, and Gloss
“Miriam Gershow's moving novel Closer asks how we know and love one another. Her characters are vibrant and believable and the world they inhabit is an awful lot like our own — full of uneasy questions and loving approximations that feel like, but may not be, understanding." —Elizabeth Costello, author of The Good War
Nine stories. Countless foibles.
Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medalist, Pencraft Awards Best Book - Summer 2024
Survival Tips: Stories follows characters through their friendships, their jobs, their marriages, and their grief as they stumble toward connection and meaning. A wife begins communicating to her husband only in rebus puzzles. A new teacher confronts her strongest foes, the parents of a disruptive student. A group of conference-goers join their guru in a jerry-rigged sweat lodge. A woman shows up to her blind date in a Don’t Leave Me t-shirt. With wit and candor, these ten stories examine the ways we live, the mistakes we make, and the paths we take in hopes of delivering us to ourselves and each other.
The collection features 20-years of stories that have appeared in The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Pithead Chapel, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, and other top publications.
“In ten stories you won’t forget, Gershow writes with a sharp eye for detail, impeccably wry wit, and unerring insight into the human heart. A stellar collection.” —Jacqueline Doyle, author of The Missing Girl
“Miriam Gershow has a knack for fictional characters so keenly human that you expect any one of them to show up at your front door.” —Debra Gwartney, author of I Am a Stranger Here Myself and Live Through This
"Going missing was the only interesting thing my brother had ever done.”
An Oregon Book Award Finalist
Spiegel & Grau
When fifteen-year-old Lydia Pasternak’s popular older brother Danny disappears late one summer night, she unwillingly becomes a celebrity in her community and an afterthought to her bereaved parents. In Danny’s absence, Lydia blossoms from a bookish outcast to the center of attention, all while grappling with her grudging grief for a brother she never particularly liked. When an intriguing private investigator enters the picture, Lydia finds herself drawn into the search for clues to Danny’s whereabouts. The shocking end to that trail of clues—an end that Lydia never prepares for—will haunt her for the rest of her life. An authentic and at times surprisingly funny dissection of public and private grief, The Local News is an accomplished, affecting debut.
“Unusually credible and precise…deftly heartbreaking.” The New York Times
“The Local News achieves two nearly impossible things: It’s a funny book about harrowing circumstances, and it’s a poignant book about high school. Gershow’s narrator, Lydia Pasternak, is droll, keen, and utterly engaging. I couldn’t put this novel down.” —Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See
Anthologies
