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How to Love a Black Hole: Stories
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 28, 2025
There's something witchy about this collection. It's giving Mariana Enriquez and Patricia Lockwood. It's giving Anya Taylor-Joy rising into the trees.
Two summers ago, my husband and I got a scary diagnosis at our 20-week ultrasound. I cried for days. One day that week, we were sitting in a coffee shop, trying to take our minds off things, when this couple walked in with a baby in a stroller, and I lost it again. I felt like, Why can't my body do this thing it's supposed to do? This thing that everybody else seems to be able to do?
Long story short, everything turned out okay. Our son is a year old now, and he's beautiful and sweet, and I hadn't thought about how I felt that day in the coffee shop for a long time -- until, abruptly, at the end of one of these short stories, that feeling came roaring back and kicked me in the gut.
I find it challenging to talk about books that hit me like that. It feels too personal, but of course, it isn't. And this collection is about that, too: Every woman in these stories is feeling things they cannot or will not explain. They're obsessed with the ways they imagine they're disappointing the people around them -- their husband, their parents, their aunt, their child, their world. And it would feel so good to let go, to let someone in, to let them lick the weird little ears growing in all the wrong places, to finally walk into the forest and rise into the trees.
Favorites: "Haunts," "Dr. Ear," "Go Back," "When We Shrunk," "How to Love a Black Hole," "If She Finds You"
Two summers ago, my husband and I got a scary diagnosis at our 20-week ultrasound. I cried for days. One day that week, we were sitting in a coffee shop, trying to take our minds off things, when this couple walked in with a baby in a stroller, and I lost it again. I felt like, Why can't my body do this thing it's supposed to do? This thing that everybody else seems to be able to do?
Long story short, everything turned out okay. Our son is a year old now, and he's beautiful and sweet, and I hadn't thought about how I felt that day in the coffee shop for a long time -- until, abruptly, at the end of one of these short stories, that feeling came roaring back and kicked me in the gut.
I find it challenging to talk about books that hit me like that. It feels too personal, but of course, it isn't. And this collection is about that, too: Every woman in these stories is feeling things they cannot or will not explain. They're obsessed with the ways they imagine they're disappointing the people around them -- their husband, their parents, their aunt, their child, their world. And it would feel so good to let go, to let someone in, to let them lick the weird little ears growing in all the wrong places, to finally walk into the forest and rise into the trees.
Favorites: "Haunts," "Dr. Ear," "Go Back," "When We Shrunk," "How to Love a Black Hole," "If She Finds You"
November 9, 2025
It's exciting when someone you know turns out to be a legitimately great artist, someone whose work you would read even if you didn't know them. Fishow's work is achingly vulnerable and visceral; her syntax is electric and precise. How to Love a Black Hole is heartbreaking and hilarious, full of exposed brains and dead babies and bad sex and crippling depression and surprise Santa Clauses/ears. Read it!
Highlights: "Dr. Ear," "When I Was Ten," "Miles," "Open Up," "Terrifying and Comforting," "If She Finds You," "Daughters," "How to Love a Black Hole."
Highlights: "Dr. Ear," "When I Was Ten," "Miles," "Open Up," "Terrifying and Comforting," "If She Finds You," "Daughters," "How to Love a Black Hole."
March 7, 2025
How to Love a Black Hole is a haunting, profoundly emotional collection that explores the fragility of human relationships, the weight of trauma, and the search for meaning in a world often defined by contradictions. Each story in the collection leaves a lasting impression, lingering in the mind long after you turn the final page. Fishow’s writing is surreal yet grounded, rich in symbolism and vivid description that blurs the lines between reality and the supernatural.
Read my full review at MicroLit Almanac: https://www.birchbarkediting.com/micr...
Read my full review at MicroLit Almanac: https://www.birchbarkediting.com/micr...
January 11, 2026
so real, so dicey, so eloquent even when maybe it wasn’t supposed to be. somehow felt seen by all of that stories, some more than others (obvi). the weird is real.
favs: something both terrifying and comforting, the shamash, dr. ear
favs: something both terrifying and comforting, the shamash, dr. ear
December 12, 2025
"Every tale in your bones can be loosed to the world. Anything you imagine can be so"--"As If in Prayer," Rebecca Fishow
How to Love a Black Hole (2025) by Rebecca Fishow is a collection of 18 short short (flash fiction) stories encompassing 74 pages of a smallish size book. The cover features a cockroach, announcing its tribute to Kafka's Metamorphosis, which we can find in the first story, "Dr. Ear," where ears proliferate on a woman's skin. The husband (no husbands or men of any kind are named in any of these stories, I think) isn't that affected by the ears, but a doctor interacts with them tenderly, connecting with her better than hubby. There's a kind of erotic horror element to the story we also find in Kafka's story. Another story, "Cockroaches" is a more comic tale, as a woman uses a gross cockroach story to dissuade the attentions of men.
Fishow calls her work, what I might have called surrealism, "irrealism," which may be intended as a blanket term for a group of approaches such as surrealism, supernaturalism, absurdism, magical realism, fantasy, creative non fiction, horror, often body horror, and so on. So in addition to "Dr. Ears" we have body horror as well in "When I Was Dead."
"Miles" is one of many, most of them, exploring different aspects of women's lives--desire, pregnancy, love, and so on. This one is touching, focused on a child who has as an imaginary friend, a sibling he might have had if not for a miscarriage. "Open Up" is ostensibly about having sex with her ex--"She mostly feels like roadkill"--but also about an inability to "open up" (really talk to) the mc's aunt. Regrets.
There's a lot of formal experimentation, too, as in "Haunts" which instead of a narrative lists a series of different kinds of hauntings. Lyrical, poetic, like a series of prose poems. Balancing formal experimentation with invention and some tender, haunted, sad bouts of empathy. Some psychological damage permeates the stories even as it exults in the imagination. There's a certain amount of Chagallian floating people, balancing light and dark effects. A tornado that showers gifts instead of destruction, but oh, there are also tornados of destruction, too.
"When We Shrunk" is not a tribute to "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," or maybe it is, in a way, but it is more serious, ultimately: "I imagined you so small I wouldn't miss you when you leaped."
I like "Mixtape" as it focuses on former high school teacher Fishow's focus on a screwed up kid.
I hear echoes of Kafka, sure; one story is a specifically Jewish parable, "The Shamash"--and I think of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and other Jewish--Yiddish--writers--Isaac Bashevis Singer and others, but there are also plenty of contemporary links to a range of writers such as Karen Russell and Diane Williams. I love these stories.
PS: I love that Fishow dedicates her book to Chicken Nugget, which I happen to know from her Facebook page is her nickname for the baby she gave birth to within months of this book coming out.
How to Love a Black Hole (2025) by Rebecca Fishow is a collection of 18 short short (flash fiction) stories encompassing 74 pages of a smallish size book. The cover features a cockroach, announcing its tribute to Kafka's Metamorphosis, which we can find in the first story, "Dr. Ear," where ears proliferate on a woman's skin. The husband (no husbands or men of any kind are named in any of these stories, I think) isn't that affected by the ears, but a doctor interacts with them tenderly, connecting with her better than hubby. There's a kind of erotic horror element to the story we also find in Kafka's story. Another story, "Cockroaches" is a more comic tale, as a woman uses a gross cockroach story to dissuade the attentions of men.
Fishow calls her work, what I might have called surrealism, "irrealism," which may be intended as a blanket term for a group of approaches such as surrealism, supernaturalism, absurdism, magical realism, fantasy, creative non fiction, horror, often body horror, and so on. So in addition to "Dr. Ears" we have body horror as well in "When I Was Dead."
"Miles" is one of many, most of them, exploring different aspects of women's lives--desire, pregnancy, love, and so on. This one is touching, focused on a child who has as an imaginary friend, a sibling he might have had if not for a miscarriage. "Open Up" is ostensibly about having sex with her ex--"She mostly feels like roadkill"--but also about an inability to "open up" (really talk to) the mc's aunt. Regrets.
There's a lot of formal experimentation, too, as in "Haunts" which instead of a narrative lists a series of different kinds of hauntings. Lyrical, poetic, like a series of prose poems. Balancing formal experimentation with invention and some tender, haunted, sad bouts of empathy. Some psychological damage permeates the stories even as it exults in the imagination. There's a certain amount of Chagallian floating people, balancing light and dark effects. A tornado that showers gifts instead of destruction, but oh, there are also tornados of destruction, too.
"When We Shrunk" is not a tribute to "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," or maybe it is, in a way, but it is more serious, ultimately: "I imagined you so small I wouldn't miss you when you leaped."
I like "Mixtape" as it focuses on former high school teacher Fishow's focus on a screwed up kid.
I hear echoes of Kafka, sure; one story is a specifically Jewish parable, "The Shamash"--and I think of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and other Jewish--Yiddish--writers--Isaac Bashevis Singer and others, but there are also plenty of contemporary links to a range of writers such as Karen Russell and Diane Williams. I love these stories.
PS: I love that Fishow dedicates her book to Chicken Nugget, which I happen to know from her Facebook page is her nickname for the baby she gave birth to within months of this book coming out.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews