Susan E Lloy

Deep Breaths of the Inanimate - Fall 2025
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Coming fall 2025 short story collection Deep Breaths of the Inanimate

“Veteran short story virtuoso Susan Lloy brings her distinctive magic to her fourth collection, Deep Breaths of the Inanimate, a meticulously wrought and resonant exploration of human loss and longing. Lloy’s characters grapple with the secrets of the past: a son who discovers that his late mother worked as a professional escort; two elderly friends whose lives are haunted by a newborn they abandoned as teenagers; a legislative aide whose career is derailed by a compromising video and finds solace in a community beset with fornicating rabbits. In sixteen poignant and memorable tales, set in that liminal emotional territory between regret and rebirth, Deep Breaths of the Inanimate charts a course straight to the reader’s heart.”

- Jacob M. Appel, author of Einstein’s Beach House.

“In these ominous, unsettling tales, Susan Lloy casts a broad net - and a spell - over us all, drawing up to the light humanity’s darkness and desires that make our species so strangely resilient. Deep Breaths of the Inanimate is a trippy read: prepare for a mind-bending journey from the exotic to the down-home, from deviance to ever-shifting targets of ‘normalcy.’ Lloy’s characters face entrapment, betrayal, isolation, and life’s bizarre twists of fate, exhibiting a beautiful toughness in their bids for freedom - the toughness that lets the luckiest survive their Scratch ‘n’ Win world. There’s an indelible truth to these fearless stories. Starting on the surface, it works its way deep down under the skin.

- Carol Bruneau, author of Threshold and Brighten the Corner Where You Are.