Fiction. The winner of the 2nd annual Starcherone Fiction Prize, a blind-judged open competition, Nina Shope's debut collection of three novellas demonstrate stunning range and intensity. In the title novella, a young woman learns that her mother is dying and finds herself stalked by nightmarish figures--the hideously transformed maiden, Arachne, an upside-down man in a Miro painting, and the spiders that hatch and haunt the text like tumors--all coinciding with the emergence of her own sexual awareness. With "In Urbem," Shope imagines an archetypal ancient city, that city beneath the pavement of all modern cities, in fantastic prose reminiscent of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Finally, "Hagiographies" explorestwo intense female friendships, both of which are suddenly and arbitrarily shattered, in a wildly inventive narrative proceeding by means of juxtaposed images rather than sequential events. "The dazzling debut of an immensely talented and big-hearted writer"--George Saunders.