Storyknife

A Paperback Original

A sharply constructed, death-defying story collection that dismantles the myths of white America, revealing race, class, and gender as fictions that can be taken apart and remade

In his first story collection in fifteen years, Jess Row evokes white America—specifically liberal, educated white Northeasterners—awkwardly and hilariously poised on the precipice of cultural and global collapse.

In “The Empties,” a woman questions whether the writing skills she acquired at liberal arts college can be useful in the face of apocalypse. In “Summer Song,” a chorus of bourgeois voices sings out its privileged discontent. “Reading Group Guide” satirizes book-club chatter with questions that veer from the absurd to the obscene. Each story turns a lens on its own machinery, exposing the quiet politics encoded in literary convention. Using surgical precision, biting irony, and formal experimentation, Row pierces through the stories white America tells itself—and the narrative structures that make them seem natural, inevitable, and true.

Storyknife is a funny, troubling, indelible look at a culture whose rituals and expectations are dissolving into thin air.

“Jess Row gazes out at the reader and cleverly, hilariously calls us out, even as he draws us in. As joyful to read as it is profound.” - Danzy Senna, author of Colored Television

“Jess Row upends narrative convention and cracks open dazzling new possibilities in this rangy, virtuosic collection. Just when I thought I knew where a story was headed the path would twist, surprise, urge me into some new and essential direction. Storyknife is a marvel.” - Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise

"Storyknife is aptly titled: the sentences in this book cut through each story's surface until we're experiencing a new story at the heart of each story. Ultimately, the book becomes a mirror, allowing us to discern in the reflection what is constructed and what is true." - Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn't Require You