Kate Axelrod’s new book of stories, How to Get Along Without Me, is, to quote the jacket copy, “a collection that summons the perversity and poignance of twentysomething dating lives from a bracingly

It is impossible to determine merely by looking how recently a modern American woman has been vaginally penetrated or rectally sodomized. One can never trust scientific data on matters such as how often a modern American woman is made love to in [enter current year].

Can you each pick two words to describe your book? 

Laura: Escapist fantasy

Eve: The first thing that came to mind for me was: “Oh, god.”

All the way up Highland isn’t Burbank, it’s heaven!

I could hear the Essex lads cooing and whispering to her, telling her that it would be okay

Her eyes looked up and zeroed in on Marina’s Muses. On the women floating through the air. No cares. Just an angel dancing in the blue heavens. 

Sheila Heti has a bad memory. She’s sitting on the stage of the Mark Taper Auditorium in the Los Angeles Central Library, wearing a velvet jumpsuit with gold tendrils and black lace tights. Heti tells

The black Mr. Sketch marker, Cucumber JUUL pods, Dr Pepper Lip Smacker, spirit duplicator, soggy sugary cereal milk mush, pink rubber pencil shavings, burning toast stroke, pumpkin spice scented hand sanitizer. 

That cicatrice ringing the heart, like notches on the prison wall, that sharp sweet spoor.

I eat a big salad and watch Kim and Kourtney eat big salads on a ten-year-old episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

We scuttled in through the back door, out of the glaring summer heat, bare feet welcoming the cool linoleum of the kitchen floor. Chattering like a pair of squirrels we rifled the pantry, pulling the

U were the only Turk i knew, and also the only Turk my parents liked. they never let me walk around the fountains at night even though it’s the only place in Sofia with streetlights after two a.m. b/c

I am seated at a small brown desk from IKEA, crafting a love letter.

See how the heart spills right out of me? Spills and spills, ink everywhere. This desk is too small.

Picture it: Me, a

A year after my wife Ada disappeared, I started attending the book club.

During the first rehearsal, her troupe members burn her thighs with incense sticks. It’s not hazing, it’s just how they bond.

Arnold Palmer died today. The news anchor announces it on the TV hanging in the corner as I’m dealt a pair of 9’s at a Jacks or Better machine. Suddenly it doesn’t matter that the news anchor

A drunk woman invites me into her canoe. It isn’t really her canoe; it belongs to a sullen man sitting by a campfire. I had wandered through the woods from my own campsite, looking for beer, and found

(Moaning loudly)

(Bed creaking)

(Crying in Italian)

Given: A girl-body will grow breasts during puberty.

Given: Girls will absorb many different messages about breasts in their lifetime.

Given: Breasts are a source of shame and

Lorena told Sofia to put a drop of her own pee
in her man’s beer
if she wanted him to love her
so she did 
and by God it worked.

I desperately wanted to have a breakdown in someone's arms.

The man at Hertz handed me the keys to a blue Corolla and smiled, revealing a large, distracting gap. In a boyish drawl he told me to return the car with a full tank, otherwise incur a $10 fee. I

The cop and strip club security guard had climbed onto the roof from outside the building and were trying to get in through the locked laundry room window. Claire let them in.

It took three of us to get a king size mattress stuffed into the tiny service elevator, pushing our shoulders into it so it would finally give and bend. It sprung out when the doors opened, like a

C lives in a building that’s beautiful and tall, and that’s sort of how he is, too, but I hope

to God no one ever tells him that.

Of course, I thought about these uncles. Even WhatsApp-d some of them when I remembered.