T.C. Boyle is the author of 31 books of fiction, including the novels World’s End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award; Drop City, a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award; The Terranauts; and the short story collections Greasy Lake and Other Stories, After the Plague, T.C. Boyle Stories, T.C. Boyle Stories II, The Relive Box and Other Stories, most recently, Blue Skies and I Walk Between the Raindrops. His works have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Granta, and The Paris Review, among other publications. Boyle won the PEN/Malamud Award for the Short Story and the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2014.
Matthew Ryan Frankel lives in Baltimore, Maryland. He would like to acknowledge his friends, his former teachers, and the staff of Enoch Pratt Central Library for their support, as well as the writers whose influence shaped the story printed here: Jean Genet, Yasunari Kawabata, and Kenzaburo Oë. His current projects include several short stories, a novel, and a philosophical work on radical freedom. “Carapace” is dedicated to his grandfather, Khye Weng Ng.
Philip Estrera is a NYC-based actor whose theater credits include Discus with Hunger & Thirst Theatre,Orphan of Zhao at La Jolla Playhouse, and Lysley Tenorio’s Monstress at the American Conservatory Theater. He appeared in the Sesame Street Thanksgiving special as Anton the bus driver, which introduced the first Asian American puppet to the series. He can be seen in episodes of Blue Bloods and New Amsterdam. He recently appeared in and helped develop the original new musical Monstress by Emily Kitchens, which featured all original bluegrass music and showcased him acting and fiddling. Estrera is a graduate of the American Conservatory Theater’s MFA program.
Renée Elise Goldsberry won a Grammy and a Tony Award for her performance as Angelica Schulyer in Hamilton. Additional Broadway credits include The Lion King, The Color Purple,Good People, and Rent. Television audiences know her from recurring roles on The Good Wife and The Following, One Life to Live, Altered Carbon, The Get Down, and as the voice of Roxie on the animated series Eureka! Her film credits include The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Tick-Tick Boom, and Anything’s Possible. Goldsberry can currently be seen as Mallory Book on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and Wickie Roy on Girls5eva.
Zach Grenier received a Tony nomination for Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations for his performance as Ludwig van Beethoven. He’s known on television for portraying David Lee on CBS’s The Good Wife and its spin-off on Paramount+ The Good Fight, Mayor Feratti on Ray Donovan, and Kenton on Hulu’s Devs. Additional credits include the films She Said, Fight Club, Zodiac, Ride with the Devil, and the television series Law & Order, Deadwood, Touching Evil, and 24. His favorite stage role is Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, which he played at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.
Meron Hadero was born in Ethiopia and immigrated to the United States with her family as a child after living briefly in Germany. She graduated from Princeton and Yale Law School before receiving an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her stories have appeared in Boulevard,The Offing, The Normal School, the anthology Addis Ababa Noir, and the 2021 edition of Best American Short Stories. Hadero is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. In 2022, she published her debut short story collection titled A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times, for which she was awarded the 2023 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction.
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, which was adapted to film in 2018, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. She was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and has also published books for young readers, mostly recently a picture book, Millions of Maxes. Wolitzer is a faculty member in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive in the novel.
CREDITS
“Top of the Food Chain” by T.C. Boyle, from T.C. Boyle Stories (Viking, 1998). First appeared in Harper’s (April 1993). Copyright © 1993 by T.C. Boyle. Used by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc.
“The Suitcase” by Meron Hadero. First published in the Missouri Review, vol 38, no. 3, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Meron Hadero. Used by permission of the author.
“Carapace,” by Matthew Ryan Frankel. Winner of the 2023 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize and published in Electric Literature (May 31, 2023). Copyright © 2023 by Matthew Ryan Frankel. Used by permission of the author.
