things we'll need for the coming difficulties

“Valerie Vogrin’s first full-length story collection is populated with characters who are lost, characters who are wounded, characters rendered with precision and the unflinching eye of an expert storyteller at the top of her craft. . . . Like us, they are deeply human and, in that way, utterly recognizable. . . . Vogrin’s prose is clear and confident and often grimly humorous, but in the end she is an artist of the unstated, deftly seeding clues that blossom into stories rich in detail and imagination.”—Dorene O’Brien, award-winning author of What It Might Feel Like to Hope

Valerie Vogrin is author of the novel Shebang. Her short stories have appeared in print in journals such as Ploughshares, AGNI, and the Los Angeles Review, online at Hobart and Bluestem, and in The Best Small Fictions 2015. In 2010 she was awarded a Pushcart Prize. She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.