Propeller Acquires Story Collection by Miriam Gershow for Publication in Spring 2024
Propeller Books has acquired Survival Tips: Stories, by Oregon writer Miriam Gershow, for publication in March of 2024. The collection features stories that have appeared in The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, and other top publications.
Survival Tips follows characters through friendships, jobs, marriages, and grief as they stumble toward connection. A wife begins communicating to her husband via rebus puzzles. A new teacher confronts the parents of a disruptive student. A group of conference-goers join their guru in a 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.
Gershow’s debut novel, The Local News (Spiegel & Grau), was hailed as “unusually credible and precise" and "deftly heartbreaking” by The New York Times, as well as “an accomplished debut” (Publisher’s Weekly) with a “disarmingly unsentimental narrative voice” (Kirkus Reviews), and was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award.
Gershow is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and an Oregon Literary Fellowship, as well as writing residencies at Playa, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and Wildacres. Her stories have been listed in the 100 Distinguished Stories of The Best American Short Stories and appeared in the Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories. She has taught fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin as well as descriptive writing to gifted high school students through Johns Hopkins University, and currently teaches at the University of Oregon.
Propeller Books is an independent press in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to its publishing projects, the press operates a retail bookstore with a focus on Pacific Northwest writers and topics in the Urbanite building in Portland, Oregon.
