Rosaler short stories ranked among 2025 top ten books in Mississippi

Maxine Rosaler’s short story collection The Missing Kidney and Other Stories won a rare spotlight this week when critic John Caleb Grenn named it one of the top ten books published in 2025. The recognition brings attention to a quietly observant collection of New York-set stories whose focus on work, care and daily survival may strike a chord in Lafayette County’s literary and university circles.

The collection opens with the title story, in which a narrator flies home from Toronto to Long Island to have a kidney removed and confronts the attrition of a relationship under the strain of ordinary life. The stories are unadorned rather than glamorous; Grenn called them “some of the best short stories of the year, some of the most polished, weird, odd and satisfying little bits of New York and American life boiled down to the essence of what it means to be alive.” Rosaler’s narrators are often nameless, alert and wry, navigating jobs, dingy apartments, and lovers who test their patience more than their passion.

Scenes and set pieces recur across the volume: in “Marigrace,” a woman’s performative happiness masks domestic strain; in “Wheatberries,” small domestic disasters and a search through South Bronx junkyards for a replacement mirror reveal a marriage’s fragile intimacies; “Man Crouched on the Sidewalk Weeping” closes the book on a note of wary renewal when two grieving strangers find a tentative human connection in a coffee shop. Rosaler’s prose leans toward the quotidian, and sometimes medical language frames emotional distress: “None of the specialists could identify what was wrong with her exactly,” a line that recurs as both literal and metaphorical diagnosis.

Rosaler, who has built a career in New York publishing, previously published Queen for a Day in 2018 and has work in journals including The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner and Tikkun. The new collection is published by Delphinium Books, runs 248 pages and retails for $27.00.

For Lafayette County, the recognition matters beyond literary prestige. Oxford and the University of Mississippi have a long history of drawing attention to regional and national voices; a title like this can shape fall course syllabi, library acquisitions and public programming at local bookstores and literary venues. More broadly, the book’s preoccupation with low-wage work, housing strain and the small mechanics of care connects to civic conversations about economic pressure and community supports that matter to residents across town and county lines.

Readers in Lafayette County who follow regional awards and campus reading lists should expect greater visibility for Rosaler in coming months. Local libraries, book groups and classroom discussions stand to gain a contemporary collection that translates big-city pressures into moments of recognizable human detail.