"A teenage runaway and her mute brother seek salvation in houses, buses, the backseats of cars. Preteen girls dial up the ghosts of fat girls on ancient payphones. A crew of bomber pilots addresses the sparks of villagers below. In ways both otherworldly and routine, the characters of Dead Girls are on the run from their own stories, possessed by the things they cannot say. With lyric artistry and emotional force, these stories dart across landscapes shaped by violence. Dead girls both real and fantastic appear again and again: as obsession, as threat, as cadavers on a table, as national myths and collective nightmares. Dead Girls won the 2017 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize" --