Published in 2020
200 pages
Miriam Cohen‘s stories have appeared in The Black Warrior Review, StoryQuarterly, West Branch Wired, Cream City Review, The Florida Review, DIAGRAM, The Collagist, Cimarron Review, Carve, The Bennington Review, Fugue, Hobart, Image, Witness, Electric Lit, and Third Coast. The recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Adults and Other Children is her debut collection.
What is this book about?
Adults and Other Children follows four women as they navigate life from the confusion and innocence of childhood to the bizarre and darkly humorous complexities of adulthood. Along the way, we meet a vindictive, and imaginary, nanny, who casts doubts about the true identity of a little girl’s new baby sister; a group of friends who spend their time obsessing over the gory details of a spate of recent crimes; a college professor who has her boss fired over an imagined sexual assault; and a Jewish woman who feigns ignorance in her religion, hoping to endear herself to an Orthodox widower. Time and again, the girls and women in this riveting debut collection fantasize and deceive to get what they want―or what they think they want―while we find ourselves drawn to their often surprising and all too human behavior.
