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Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction
Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story CollectionThanks for This Riot explores the limits of kindness, the weight of being needed, and the fear of being misunderstood. A group counselor is taunted by a truth-divining piano bench, a voice actor shouts her abortion at the state capitol, a tired caregiver tangles with a pair of stand-up comics, a small-town newspaper office shelters an otherworldly tattletale, a backwoods acupuncturist leans on her least-exciting offspring, a girl in a strapless bra takes a vengeful go-kart ride, and a woman gets surgery to lower her expectations (she thinks it went “okay”). Grouped by types of riot-external riots, internal riots, and laugh riots-
Thanks for This Riot is a poignant and mordantly funny collection with a distinctly feminist viewpoint.
List of contents
External Riots: Threats and Violence
More Restrictive Than Supportive
The Crowded Private Cottage
All I Need Are These Four Walls and Some Positive Feedback
No Space Is Too Small When Your Head Is Detachable
Babies Don’t Keep
Internal Riots: Secrets and Lies
Prove It
These New Francescas
Perceptor Weekly
Bulk Trash Is for Lovers
Safe Distances
Laugh Riots: Growing and Trying
Enviable Levels
Full Stop
The Right Light
Wilderness Mound
Thanks for This Riot
Acknowledgments
Source Acknowledgments
About the author
Janelle Bassett’s writing appears or is forthcoming in the
Rumpus,
Indiana Review,
Smokelong Quarterly,
American Literary Review, the
Offing,
Washington Square Review,
Wigleaf, and
Best Microfiction 2023. She lives in Saint Louis and is a fiction editor at
Split Lip Magazine.
Summary
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Thanks for This Riot explores the limits of kindness, the weight of being needed, and the fear of being misunderstood.
