Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction- Inhale, Volume 25

Inhale is a novel in stories that accumulate until they begin to answer one another: a prologue pulled from static; sutures counted down to the last in triage; permits that rename the living. Here, paperwork decides who moves and who disappears, and those who forge it are not criminals so much as locksmiths: They make the dead mobile so the living can cross. From Gaza's checkpoints to basements that sweat salt, seawater pools behind the teeth—carried without swallowing, held without speaking. A death certificate is stamped on a body still breathing. Grandma scratches years beneath bowls—1948, 1967, 1987—and lifts one to your ear. In Khan Younis, Shireen stitches; in Shifa, a widow asks for her husband's papers. Forgetting never gets cheaper here. The sea doesn't translate; it transmits. You open—just the mouth—hold the water, unspilled, and inhale. "I devoured Inhale the same way the characters in war-ravaged Gaza devour pilfered drugs. The prose is reminiscent of Bruno Schultz, the doomed Polish magic realist who was murdered by the Nazis while still a young man. In Gaza the honey tastes of gunpowder because the bees have sipped from bullet holes; you might dream of leaning to retrieve a dropped spoon in an ice cream shop, only to have your head burst into shrapnel. It's a place where sunlight breaks on razor wire like cold splinters of gin, and cemeteries smell of crushed mint. There is a ruthless honesty in these stories, and also a ruthless beauty. I want to press Inhale into the hands of every reader."—Patricia Henley, judge and author of Apple & Palm and Hummingbird House (National Book Award Finalist)