Subcortical

by Lee Conell

Recipient of the 2018 Story Prize Spotlight Award

Lee Conell's linguistically deft stories examine the permeability between the real and the imagined, the stories buried beneath the surface and the stories by which we live our lives.

In the title story of this collection, a young woman who wants to become a doctor is manipulated by an older man into playing a role in one of his medical studies. In "The Lock Factory," winner of the Chicago Tribune's 2016 Nelson Algren Literary Award, three women who assemble school combination locks are trapped inside an escalating generational conflict of their own making. A boy who has lost his mother in "The Rent-Controlled Ghost" searches for the spirit of the mistreated tenant who formerly inhabited his apartment. "A Magic Trick for the Recently Unemployed" serves as a three-step how-to guide for reclaiming a sense of self and purpose. In "What the Blob Said to Me," an elderly woman dwells on her long-ago experience working at a government production site for the atomic bomb. And a mother-daughter Groupon for an upscale afternoon tea goes seriously awry in "Mutant at the Pierre Hotel."

With humor and verve, Subcortical's dynamic stories delve into the mysteries of the human mind as these haunted characters struggle with economic disparity, educational divides, and the often-contested spaces in which they live.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2017

About the author

Lee Conell has taught for Southern Word, SUNY New Paltz, and Vanderbilt University, where she earned her MFA. Her fiction has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review online, Guernica, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.

(source: Amazon)

Reviews

[Sean Kinch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Conell has loads of talent. I can’t wait to red a novel by her, though I hope she always returns to short fiction, a form she clearly has a knack for.

[Jessamyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful stories. Intricate descriptions that also feel easy, natural and true.

[Jeffrey Canino]

"There’s her heart, they would say, and through the window they’d installed they would study my heart’s chambers, its compartments, its universe of flaws and degradations, its perpetual failure at digesting loss, sadness, shame, pride, because a heart is not a stomach, because digestion (the colonizers would decide) is not what this particular and singular hollow organ was ever designed to do. No, it had its own uses."

Each of the stories in Lee Conell's debut collection is a strange seed bathed in moonlight. Over the course of their lengths, fed by lunar illumination, they germinate, mature, and flower into forms unmistakably human, adorned with petals alternately sharp and delicate. The variety of colors on display, of lives examined, would be impressive from a veteran literary horticulturist. That Conell's green thumb is evident from the start of her career is all the more to her credit.

SUBCORTICAL is the most cohesive and stylistically assured story collection I've read in years. Some of these exceptional tales-- "What the Blob Said to Me," "My Four Stomachs," "Mutant at the Pierre Hotel"-- will be blooming in my moonlit dreams for years to come.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fave stories: “What the Blob Said to Me,” “Guardian,” Unit Cell,” and “Ghost Train.”