Who has a right to tell us how to experience our grief? How to perform--or not perform--the roles society prescribes to us based on our various points of identity?

As If She Had a Say, the second story collection from Jennifer Fliss, uses an absurdist lens to showcase characters--predominantly women--plumbing their resources as they navigate misogyny, abuse, and grief. In these stories, a woman melts in the face of her husband's cruelty; a seven-tablespoons-long woman lives inside a refrigerator and engages in an affair with the man of the house; a balloon-animal artist attends a funeral to discover he was invited as more than entertainment; and a man loses all his nouns.

Fans of Karen Russell and Carmen Maria Machado will appreciate how As If She Had a Say's inventive narratives expose inequities by taking us on imaginative romps through domesticity and patriarchal expectations. Each story functions as a magnifying glass through which we might examine our own lives and see ourselves more clearly.