Department of English

Poor Connections is a collection of short stories about women in the modern generation. These stories follow women at the onset of adulthood struggling with relationships, morality, and the rise of the digital world. “Do Good People Sleep at Night” follows a narrator’s obsessive desire to be a good person. In “She Has a Nice Personality,” a pair of longtime female friends confront the pressures of beauty as currency, the tension between them exploding in an unlikely conclusion. The penultimate story, “Retraction,” presents a relationship falling apart in the face of a life-changing decision. In “Going Nowhere,” the last story of the collection, the narrator reflects on the consequences of her internet addiction. These stories want to know how to hold on to each other in a lonely world.