Little Fury

The woman will always be going like that, luminous, vast and slow, exonerated from space and time, infinitely floating on through the endless mist, and there will never be a single there at which she would want to arrive.

Winner of The Metatron Prize for Rising Authors (Fiction), Casey Bell’s slipstream feminist fiction pulses with otherworldly lyricism.

Best friends in a dystopian near-future seek transcendence while serving time for their abortions; a mother reeling from postpartum depression drinks champagne with the ghost of Simone de Beauvoir; a trans woman rapt by visions after a brutal attack anoints a cow as it sinks to the ocean floor. The characters of Little Fury yearn for hope in the rubble of a broken world. Suspended between the real and surreal, Bell’s debut lingers in the slippery in-between of dreaming and waking, voicelessness and uproar, longing and belonging.

Praise

“Little Fury is a smart, unsettling marvel of feminist fabulism. (A woman fleeing postpartum hell meets Audre Lorde and Simone de Beauvoir inside a desert cactus!) As they probe the intricate ambivalences of friendship, sex, and motherhood, these stories blaze with longing and darkness and defiance and inchoate joy.”
— Leni Zumas author of Red Clocks

“Little Fury captures the lives of its finely drawn characters with a sensitive vitality akin to the short stories of Lucia Berlin. Bell’s prose is filled with a fragrant heat that makes even the most ordinary of circumstances striking. An evocative, pleasurable debut.”
— Marlowe Granados, author of Happy Hour

“These luminous stories delve into the ambivalences of contemporary womanhood, offering not only fierce portraits of loneliness and want, but also surprising possibilities for new modes of communion.”
— Claire Stanford, author of Happy for You

“Little Fury explores longings of both flesh and spirit, offering glimpses of what it’s like to be free from patriarchy, what it’s like to be truly free. Bell is a furiously talented, visionary writer; her stories leave me breathless, leave me believing we can make a better world.”
— Gayle Brandeis, author of Drawing Breath

“These impassioned stories are viscerally angry, heartrendingly sad, and mordantly funny—often all at once—and told in fierce, controlled, gorgeous prose.”
— Christopher Coake, author of You Would Have Told Me Not To

Awards

Winner – The Metatron Prize for Rising Authors
2021 – Fiction – Judged by Marlowe Granados

Press

Montreal Review of Books – “If this is what Bell can pack into a short story, I can only imagine what she could do with a novel. Or, actually, I really can’t, but I can only hope that it involves more couch heavens, feminist cactus palaces, and menstrual sanctuaries.”

A Book & Its Author [Podcast] – 040: Little Fury by Casey Bell

The Miramichi Reader – “Little Fury is a solid debut from a promising new author. Bell’s stories are dark and difficult, reflecting the general despair a lot of people feel these days. Little Fury digs into the delicate places we hide, the fear of finding ourselves in a dystopian future, and shows us how very similar it is to our current time. It left me feeling unsettled, which is a good sign for a strong, thought-provoking collection of short stories. For a fierce debut collection, Little Fury is worth your time.”

Casey Bell

Casey Bell has an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno. Her fiction appears in Sequestrum, Cream City Review, New South, The Boiler, Reed Magazine, The New Limestone Review and Timber. She was shortlisted for the Iowa Review Fiction Award and was a finalist for the American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Prize, the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and the Calvino Prize. Casey is the co-director of Girls Rock Reno, a music camp for self-identified girls, trans and gender-expansive youth. Originally from Philadelphia, PA, she now lives in Reno, NV with her partner, Dan, and their pug-mix, Maud. She teaches English at the University of Nevada, Reno and is the drummer and singer of the band Fine Motor.