Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival — JoeAnn Hart

In Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, a collection of short fiction, characters struggle with Covid, ecological destruction, and grief as they attempt to find solace and restoration from a nature that is not always in a position to give back. A young couple raises crickets for food, a woman in a caged complex is witness to the deterioration of her neighbor, and an uncompromising ego takes on a Biblical rain. In these stories, the climate crisis arrives not just as strange and violent weather, but as upheavals in our political and emotional climates as well. And with science unable to keep up, fake suicides, fairy tales, and delusion are the thorny tools humans are left with to carry on, yet carry on they do.