Coming 10/21/25 from Rescue Press! Pre-orders in August!
The stories in this collection explore the textures and tensions of contemporary life, pressing on our ambivalence, how we belong to but differ from the world around us. In Hurricane Envy, characters struggle to be perceived by others as they perceive themselves—as an authentic artist, a “good white person,” a legitimate parent. Jaffe brings her keen eye and her formal ingenuity to subjects that range from queer parenting, to the rise of the algorithm in the music industry, to gentrification and institutional claims on art, to post-punk culture, anti-Zionist Jewish identity, the rhetoric and realities of American safety. With humor and meticulous care, Jaffe celebrates and unsettles our desires, our self-knowledge—sentence by sentence, these stories find new possibilities within what we already know.
What people are saying:
These stories crackle and hum, bristle and buzz; they charge the air with their characters' queer wants while asking and showing what stories—and music—can do. And the prose! Each finely tuned sentence of this superbly crafted and disarmingly funny book delivers some jolt or delight. An outstanding collection by one of my favorite writers.
–Megan Milks
God this is good. Sara Jaffe—I knew already from her exquisitely subtle novel of young queer adolescence, Dryland—is the maestro of rendering what it means to be misperceived. If her narrators in Hurricane Envy have grown some, have found themselves and organized their lives according to their inmost convictions and their agonizingly niche proclivities, their basic plight is the same (the same for all of us?): to attract notice or to escape notice—or, narrowly, both. The giggle to heart-pang ratio here is expertly one-to-one, and both columns of the ledger are brimming. Brilliant.
–Brian Blanchfield
Sara Jaffe's stories are sharp-witted, unusual, and surprising. Jaffe finds the odd moment, the change of circumstance, the imperfect setting—a bar and a baby, say—to play havoc with expectations. Her stories delight me.
–Lynne Tillman
