Becky Hagenston

"At its essence, this enjoyable collection explores how nothing is ever exactly as it seems."--Booklist "These ingenious stories are so funny and sparkling and slyly inventive that their pain catches you by surprise, like a sunburn after a day at the beach."--Eric Puchner In Becky Hagenston's fourth collection, the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. The characters are sex-toy sellers, internet trolls, parents, students, and babysitters--all trying to make sense of a world where nothing is quite what it appears to be. A service robot makes increasingly disturbing requests. A middle school teacher is accused of witchcraft--and realizes the accusations might be true. Two college students devise a way to avoid getting hit on in bars. A baker finds bizarre anomalies in his sourdough. A librarian follows her dead ex-husband through the Atlanta airport. In these stories, men and women confront grief, danger, loneliness, and sometimes--the strangest discovery of all--unexpected joy. Hagenston delivers a collection that is, at its weird and shining heart, about people discovering what--for better or worse--they are capable of.

A woman obsessed with reality TV encounters a sorority girl who has embarked on a very personal scavenger hunt. A man unexpectedly discovers that his father—a seemingly rational man—believes, seriously, in lake monsters. A woman whose husband has just survived a near-fatal accident flees to St. Petersburg, Russia, to wander through museums and palaces and simply try to forget. Hansel (yes, that Hansel), all grown up, tries to be a good father. A young girl begins to suspect that the séances being held in her basement just might not be as harmless as they seem. These are the people and situations—where the familiar and bizarre intermix—that animate Becky Hagenston’s stories in Scavengers. From Mississippi to Arizona to Russia, characters find themselves faced with a choice: make sense of the past, or run from it. But Hagenston reminds us that even running can never be pure—so which parts of your past do you decide to hold on to? A brilliant collection from a master of short fiction, Scavengers is surprising, strange, and moving by turns—and wholly unforgettable.

Becky Hagenston's debut collection, A Gram of Mars was selected by A.M. Homes as the 1997 Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, these stories portray the modern family as one that refuses to be fashionably dysfunctional. In the hyphenated, divorced, and step-parented context of the late twentieth century, Hagenston reminds us, it is the minister and his wife in a small town in Maryland who are unconventional. These stories, conveyed with spirited, conversational prose, prove that the meaning of family prevails. In "Holding the Fort," a husband's infidelity dissolves his marriage but not the couple's emotional ties. And in "A Gram of Mars," an adult daughter responds to her divorced father's anguish upon learning of his ex-wife's remarriage, and the whole fractured family reconvenes for an evening: "Beside me, my father is breathing slow and regular as a child, and I wonder suddenly if he's fallen asleep. But his eyes are open, fixed on the road. For a moment, I believe I know what he's thinking-he has seen the woman he loves, and his daughter is beside him, and for now everything is just as simple as that. . . . When he sighs, I lean back in my seat and try to think of nothing. The sky vaults over us and silence settles down, like a pact we've made together, like a precious, immeasurable weight."Hagenston manages, with subtle emotional logic, to turn the joke of the dysfunctional family on its head. As one character says, "If something can begin millions of years ago on Mars and somehow, miraculously, find its way to my father-then why not something simpler, like happiness, which happens every day right here on earth?"Becky Hagenston grew up in Maryland and received her MFA from the University of Arizona. Her stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from such journals as TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, The Crescent Review, Antietam Review, Folio, Press, and Carolina Quarterly. One of her stories was included in Prize Stories 1996: The O'Henry Awards. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico.