Female Education — Rita Ciresi

Ciresi's 14 thought-provoking flash fictions deal with love, loss, and the hard choices women make. Her characters experience great joy and passion; they endure failed marriages, displacement, rejection, and grief. Their narratives are influenced by contemporary ideals of female empowerment, as well as former female education practices that attempted to control women. In spare prose, these stories are hilarious, poignant, and sad, and sometimes all at once.