Casey Bell with Claire Stanford, Little Fury

“Little Fury captures the lives of its finely drawn characters with a sensitive vitality akin to the short stories of Lucia Berlin. Bell’s prose is filled with a fragrant heat that makes even the most ordinary of circumstances striking. An evocative, pleasurable debut.”
— Marlowe Granados, author of Happy Hour

Join us Thursday evening as we celebrate local author, Casey Bell's debut collection of short stories, Little Fury. Casey will be joined in conversation by Claire Stanford.

Suspended between the real and surreal, Little Fury merges earthy realism with other-worldly lyricism to linger in the unsettling, slippery in-between of dreaming and waking, voicelessness and uproar, longing and belonging.

Best friends in a dystopian near-future seek transcendence while serving time for their abortions; a new mother reeling from postpartum depression slips from reality into fantasy, clinking champagne flutes with the ghost of Simone de Beauvoir; a trans woman rapt by visions and memories after a brutal attack grants last rights to a cow as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean; a woman killed in an industrial accident achieves self-actualization in the afterlife, adrift on a mystical couch. The characters inhabiting Little Fury yearn and fumble for connection, seeking hope beneath the rubble of a broken world.

Casey Bell has an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno. Her debut short story collection, Little Fury, is forthcoming from Metatron Press in 2023. Casey's fiction appears in Sequestrum, Cream City Review, New South, The Boiler, Reed Magazine, The New Limestone Review and Timber. She was shortlisted for the Iowa Review Fiction Award and was a finalist for the American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Prize, the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and the Calvino Prize. Casey is the co-director of Girls Rock Reno, a music camp for self-identified girls, trans and gender-expansive youth. She's also the singer and drummer of the local band Fine Motor and the proud mother of a pug-mix named Maud.

Claire Stanford's work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, Tin House Flash Fridays, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Lit, and Lit Hub among other publications. She is also the author of NYT's Book Editor's Choice, Happy For You. Originally from Berkley, she currently lives in Reno, where she is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.