Everybody Needs Something

by Melanie Pappadis Faranello

Melanie Faranello’s debut collection, Everybody Needs Something, delves into the interior lives of characters longing for connection, revealing the deep human desire to reach one another. A poignant exploration of the complexities of love, loss, and what is often left unsaid, the stories center on the space between us—couples, families, aging parents, children, and evolving selves that are shaped over time.

A newly widowed construction worker travels to a debris-filled healing pool to ease his grief; a retired couple relocates across the globe hoping to escape their troubles only to discover a new problematic infestation; a father places an ad inviting strangers to his first solo Thanksgiving dinner; a couple on the brink endures a wildlife lecture at the elementary school between hospital visiting hours for their daughter; a young divorcee has an unexpected encounter with her long-dead father during a Latin Ballroom dance class.

Quietly powerful and carefully observed, these fourteen stories resonate with emotional landscapes and hidden heartbreaks as characters meet their breaking points before somehow finding the courage to keep going.

178 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 15, 2026

About the author

Melanie Faranello is the author of the story collection, Everybody Needs Something, winner of the 2025 Donald L Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. Her fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Swamp Pink, Electric Literature, StoryQuarterly, Hippocampus, Vol 1. Brooklyn, HuffPost Personal, Blackbird, StorySouth and others. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, recipient of a Writer-in-Residence Award from Monson Arts, and an Artist Fellowship from CT Office of the Arts, she won Key West Literary Seminars’ Emerging Writer Award for her Novel-in-Progress. She is the founder of Poetry on the Streets, a community engagement project.

Reviews

[Sara]

LOVED, blurbed with deep admiration:

“Who’s ever really prepared for anything in life?" Melanie Faranello asks in her beautiful, big-hearted debut collection. EVERYBODY NEEDS SOMETHING may be driven by loss and longing, by families -- spouses, children, parents -- fractured by grief, but it's "those little truths" they arrive at, time and again, with an almost incidental grace that suffuse these searching stories with the lasting wisdom and generosity of a prize-winning debut. WIth quiet, unassuming mastery, Faranello renders her characters with such penetrative tenderness that their universal wish -- for connection -- is fulfilled tenfold by the reader. These are wonderful, human stories I'm grateful to have, to turn to, again and again.

[Alison]

I was so glad to read Melanie Pappadis Faranello's debut fiction collection EVERYBODY NEEDS SOMETHING. The stories are so finely wrought, so full of insight, and they turn purposefully ordinary folks and places into microcosms of sorrow and wonder.
Some of the characters are children, but I'd like to give a special thumbs-up to the gorgeous middle-agedness of most of the stories: "Jack surveyed his organs, the ones he knew by name anyway. Go on, he said to each one as though demanding away a stray having wandered onto his property. Stubborn, lost, looking for love. Go on, go, find a new body to work for, do the one thing you were designed to do, and do it well."
Mourning for children--those you were, those you've had--who are grown and lost is a major theme, alongside the quest to define what it means to be, or not to be, "fine" amidst it all. Here's a couple mourning their missing daughter and visiting her "simple clubhouse. A hideaway. A place to be a child, to make believe, to read magazines, and later to kiss boys, to smoke and drink. A bunker in the sky. Just a quarter mile from homebase. What fools they were to make this pilgrimage today. Their daughter on that motorcycle, hair whipping across her face, pursed lips, in the corner of the photo, a gray shirtsleeve belonging to the prehistoric dinosaur who was riding their daughter away, driving her away down some windy rocky road."
Then, "As they headed back through the woods, a different silence descended. They stepped over damp logs and matted leaves, unwinding their way through this territory they knew so well, crossing the half mile of land that if one kept going would extend toward route 99, and even further, right into the parking lot of the Kreugers that went up last spring, and beyond that across the Butler’s farm, which had been ravaged last summer from the drought, Bob Butler never fully recovering from the toll it took, but word was it also had something to do with little Robbie going off to Afghanistan and coming home six months later only to be shipped off again, and beyond that the Elmwood subdivision where some of the bible folks lived, and even further to some windy road with a wall of boulders where their only daughter was riding away, but that was a place they didn’t know and Dawn stopped her thoughts from going there. But this here—that elm, and the fallen oak, and the poison ivy crawling around that rotted stump, and the patch of clover around the bend, they knew this stretch of woods as well as the dogs who’d learned their way since they were pups. But none of that made Martin’s strange reticence any better. His silence unsettled her." It leads to my favorite, most astonishing conclusion in the collection, such love, mystery, and healing. And a masterclass in world-building.
The collection reminds me of why I first fell in love with short stories, but with a different and renewed appreciation and excitement: they're stories for the reader and writer I am NOW. Thank you!

[Cynthia Martin]

So good and characters I’m still thinking about. The son who becomes a father in the first story, Jack driving for hours in the second one. Leah in the third story who, at the suggestion of her therapist, tries ballroom dancing to connect with others, and in fact she reconnects with herself. Dawn and Martin in “The Treehouse,” my favorite story. Their seventeen-year-old daughter goes missing in October, six months before we meet them. And the breakfast in “Just Fine,” a second favorite, where the tension between a father and a son is magnified by what is happening in the restaurant, where the wait staff is dressed as elves. And there’s so much more. Just writing this makes me want to read it again.

[Katrina]

Elegant and compelling.

[Jody Hobbs]

I loved these nuanced stories of challenging moments. Fully developed characters. Very satisfying read.