A gorgeously wrought exploration of what it means to exist in the in-between.

In her debut short-story collection A Small Apocalypse, Laura Chow Reeve examines cultural inheritance, hybridity, queerness, and the stickiness of home with an eye for both the uncanny and the realistic: human bodies become reptilian, queer ghosts haunt their friends, a young woman learns to pickle memories, and a theater floods during an apocalyptic movie marathon. The characters in A Small Apocalypse weave in and out of its fourteen stories, confronting their sense of otherness and struggling to find new ways of being and belonging. Heavily steeped in the swampy, feral heat of Florida, these stories venture beyond the problems of constructing an identity to the frontier of characters living their truth in a world that doesn’t yet have a place for them.

LAURA CHOW REEVE is a writer and illustrator living in Richmond, Virginia. Her fiction has been published in the Rumpus, Catapult, and Joyland, among other publications. Her story in Hyphen was a 2017 winner of the Pen/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and featured on LeVar Burton Reads.

“The stories in A Small Apocalypse all feel wildly different—Laura Chow Reeve’s debut offers readers real range—but they are also united beautifully by their thematic territory, by the author’s distinctive way of seeing, and by the vividly conveyed and evocative Floridian setting. I love this collection.” — Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson— -

Named a "most anticipated" book of 2024 by The Rumpus and Debutiful. 

“Anyone who has ever felt like an outsider, will find this work to be resonant, poignant, and, perhaps, startlingly cathartic.” —Booklist

“A Small Apocalypse is queer Florida at its absolute finest. Laura Chow Reeve has written a group of stories that astonish, mesmerize, and amaze in equal measure. I enjoyed every moment. A smashing collection!” —Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth— -