The Missing Woman and Other Stories

Winner of:
Ploughshares, 2015 John C. Zacharis Award

Stories in The Missing Woman circle around women who are either literally missing – a mother in rehab, a daughter never born – or who are missing some metaphorical piece of themselves.  A father tries to convince his uncompromising, anorexic daughter to want to live, a single woman lures men to her bed only to abandon them, and a marriage is shaken by a search party for a woman who’s disappeared. Burns asks questions about balance – safety with adventure, dreams with practicality, grief with joy – and challenges the reader to take a journey, make choices...

Carole Burns is an American author and lecturer from Danbury, Connecticut, who now lives in Cardiff. She is the author of a book of interviews with writers, Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings, and Everything in Between, and she is head of creative writing at the University of Southampton as well as a co-organizer of the XX Women’s Writing Festival. She has been previously short-listed for the 2012, 2013 and 2014 Bridport Prize in Short Fiction, and was awarded the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award in Fiction. Her stories have been published in Folio, Ploughshares, Puerto del Sol, and Two Rivers Review.