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Survival Tips: Stories
Survival Tips: Stories follows characters through their friendships, their jobs, their marriages, and their grief as they stumble toward connection and meaning. A wife begins communicating to her husband only in rebus puzzles. A new teacher confronts her strongest foes, the parents of a disruptive student. A group of conference-goers join their guru in a jerry-rigged sweat lodge. A woman shows up to her blind date in a "Don't Leave Me" t-shirt. With wit and candor, these ten stories examine the ways we live, the mistakes we make, and the paths we take in hopes of delivering us to ourselves and each other.
“In ten stories you won’t forget, Gershow writes with a sharp eye for detail, impeccably wry wit, and unerring insight into the human heart. A stellar collection.” —Jacqueline Doyle, author of The Missing Girl
“Miriam Gershow has a knack for fictional characters so keenly human that you expect any one of them to show up at your front door. ” —Debra Gwartney, author of I Am a Stranger Here Myself and Live Through This
"In this poignant examination of human hypocrisy and devotion, Gershow writes with intelligence, humor, and empathy. I loved Survival Tips.” —Corrina Wycoff, author of Damascus House and O Street
“In ten stories you won’t forget, Gershow writes with a sharp eye for detail, impeccably wry wit, and unerring insight into the human heart. A stellar collection.” —Jacqueline Doyle, author of The Missing Girl
“Miriam Gershow has a knack for fictional characters so keenly human that you expect any one of them to show up at your front door. ” —Debra Gwartney, author of I Am a Stranger Here Myself and Live Through This
"In this poignant examination of human hypocrisy and devotion, Gershow writes with intelligence, humor, and empathy. I loved Survival Tips.” —Corrina Wycoff, author of Damascus House and O Street
- GenresFictionShort Stories
166 pages, Paperback
Published March 19, 2024
About the author
Miriam Gershow
5 books30 followersMiriam Gershow is the author of Survival Tips: Stories (Propeller Books) and the forthcoming novel, Closer (Regal House, 2025). Her debut novel, The Local News (Spiegel & Grau), was hailed as “unusually credible and precise" and "deftly heartbreaking” by The New York Times.
Miriam’s stories appear in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. Her flash fiction appears in anthologies from Alan Squire Books and Alternating Currents, as well as in Pithead Chapel, Had, and Variant Lit, where she is the inaugural winner of the Pizza Prize. Her creative nonfiction is featured in Salon and Craft Literary among other journals.
She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and an Oregon Literary Fellowship, as well as writing residencies at Playa, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and Wildacres. Her stories have been listed in the 100 Distinguished Stories of The Best American Short Stories and appeared in the Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories. Her writing has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award (Ken Kesey Award for the Novel).
She received her MFA from the University of Oregon, and has since taught fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin as well as descriptive writing to gifted high school students through Johns Hopkins University. She has taught writing to first-graders, retirees, and everyone in between. Miriam lives with her family in Eugene OR, where she teaches writing at the University of Oregon.
(Photo Credit: Livia Fremouw)
Miriam’s stories appear in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. Her flash fiction appears in anthologies from Alan Squire Books and Alternating Currents, as well as in Pithead Chapel, Had, and Variant Lit, where she is the inaugural winner of the Pizza Prize. Her creative nonfiction is featured in Salon and Craft Literary among other journals.
She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and an Oregon Literary Fellowship, as well as writing residencies at Playa, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and Wildacres. Her stories have been listed in the 100 Distinguished Stories of The Best American Short Stories and appeared in the Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories. Her writing has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award (Ken Kesey Award for the Novel).
She received her MFA from the University of Oregon, and has since taught fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin as well as descriptive writing to gifted high school students through Johns Hopkins University. She has taught writing to first-graders, retirees, and everyone in between. Miriam lives with her family in Eugene OR, where she teaches writing at the University of Oregon.
(Photo Credit: Livia Fremouw)
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 12, 2023
So grateful for the opportunity to be an early reader for this collection. This was a rare time when I had become friendly with the author over the past few years, initially from a shared writing course, but had not read any of her published work. I was so blown away by the short stories in this book. "Survival Tips" is a collection of engaging, heartfelt, hilarious, and true-to-life stories delivered in varied formats (some hermit crab pieces and others in standard prose). They were thoughtful and so well-written; I found myself thinking about them at different moments in my day, well after I'd finished each one. The relatable theme of how difficult and confusing relationships can be and, more specifically, communication between and among people. The characters in this collection are varied ages, backgrounds, genders, and personalities. Even the most frustrating of them was strangely huggable and forgivable. I hesitate in adding direct quotes as this is still an uncorrected proof, but I'll be rereading and dog-earing MANY pages of a hard copy once it is released in March 2024. I can say, with full candor, that I enjoyed every single story in this collection but Carker, Congratulations, Baby, Don't Leave Me, and Pipelines are Pipes were standout favorites. The hermit crab pieces were stellar!! And Lines of Communication can also be found in an awesome anthology (out 11/14/2023) called "Already Gone: 40 Stories Of Running Away" (edited by @hannahgrieco) and reviewed in Goodreads. Blessed to love books and writers and this one is a getter and a KEEPER. LLJ
December 19, 2023
I'm the creative nonfiction editor at CRAFT, where we published a stunning nonfiction microflash by Miriam Gershow, so I was thrilled to get an advance look at her story collection. Here's the long form of the blurb I wrote:
Miriam Gershow’s characters in Survival Tips range from wives and husbands to teenage girls to women on blind dates to women clinging to friendships past their expiration date. They struggle with communication. An insecure teacher attempts to talk to parents about a boy who refuses to speak in class. A lonely relay operator develops a crush on a deaf caller whose phone conversations he facilitates. A drunken woman at an old friend’s baby shower “needs to make her unhappiness communicable,” no matter whom she alienates. A woman argues secretly with her husband while making “daytime sangria” for mothers she barely knows at her toddler’s birthday party. An unhappy wife tries to communicate with her spouse through rebuses because “the marital therapist said they need to establish new lines of communication.” Relationships fall apart. Relationships fail to start. Relationships survive. In ten stories you won’t forget, Gershow writes with a sharp eye for detail, impeccably wry wit, and unerring insight into the human heart. A stellar collection.
Jacqueline Doyle, author of The Missing Girl
Miriam Gershow’s characters in Survival Tips range from wives and husbands to teenage girls to women on blind dates to women clinging to friendships past their expiration date. They struggle with communication. An insecure teacher attempts to talk to parents about a boy who refuses to speak in class. A lonely relay operator develops a crush on a deaf caller whose phone conversations he facilitates. A drunken woman at an old friend’s baby shower “needs to make her unhappiness communicable,” no matter whom she alienates. A woman argues secretly with her husband while making “daytime sangria” for mothers she barely knows at her toddler’s birthday party. An unhappy wife tries to communicate with her spouse through rebuses because “the marital therapist said they need to establish new lines of communication.” Relationships fall apart. Relationships fail to start. Relationships survive. In ten stories you won’t forget, Gershow writes with a sharp eye for detail, impeccably wry wit, and unerring insight into the human heart. A stellar collection.
Jacqueline Doyle, author of The Missing Girl
March 14, 2024
I quite enjoyed this collection. The stories were playful yet delightfully astute and psychologically rich. Rarely are the wounded so entertaining; rarely is the exploration of their interiors so invigorating for the reader. When employing, as Gershow does, such humor, edge, and wisdom, no topic is unbroachable, no depiction marred with the dual stains of poignancy and in-your-face symbolism prevalent in fiction today. I particularly enjoyed how Gershow manages in several stories—like “Carker,” All That Apply,” “Congratulations, Baby,” and “Don’t Leave Me”—to capture the various emotional transitions of her characters, seemingly leading them to the brink of life-altering realizations.
Survival Tips runs the gamut. Marriage, divorce, evolution, devolution, tweener mischief and a bunch of lost souls risking their lives in a sweat lodge for their spiritual leader. A wonderful collection.
Survival Tips runs the gamut. Marriage, divorce, evolution, devolution, tweener mischief and a bunch of lost souls risking their lives in a sweat lodge for their spiritual leader. A wonderful collection.
April 20, 2024
I loved the friends and friendenemies, the mates and mateenemies in Survival Tips. Miriam Gershow is one of my writing comrades-- I admire so much about her books-- read her novel The Local News if you haven't already and keep your eyes peeled for her forthcoming novel Closer. My loud shout outs for the stories collected in Survival Tips: the depth of the characters! the ingenuity of their situations! the way plots resolve! The only way out-- to survive-- is through, writes Gershow, no matter the sweat, the tears, the dirty hands, the unanswered prayers, the broken hearts.
July 18, 2024
Brilliant. Miriam is a master of characters who are textured and exist beyond any and all binaries. Flawed in the most real of ways, sometimes surprising and sometimes not (which is also surprising in the moment), they are all navigating their circumstances with authentic awkwardness. Gershows details are delicious and the collection well organized leaving one with the perfect endnote of flavors. A wonderful read.
May 28, 2024
I loved Gershows novel The Local News. I don’t understand why it wasn’t praised more. So I was very excited to get my hands on her recent book of short stories. I’m not a lover of short stories unless they are connected in some way as I find them uneven to read. That was true of this collection but several of them were worth the price of admission. 3.5
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews