A New Day: Stories

For fans of Lily King’s Five Tuesdays in Winter, a contemporary short story collection that explores the depths of everyday humanity and the universal yearning for new beginnings.

Linked by their personal and professional relationships, the characters in these thirteen stories--all set between 1982 and 2012--struggle to achieve happiness and success. A coke-fueled night with a photographer costs a young woman her job in the display department of Bloomingdale’s, but holds a hidden promise. A sculptor tries to resurrect his relationship with an old flame on the same day her best friend is undergoing a bone marrow transplant. An aspiring actress drifts from house-sit to house-sit until an armed robbery at the restaurant where she works makes her question a lifelong pattern of impermanence.

Moody, elegiac, and full of longing, with ricocheting themes of desire and loss, A New Day’s stories are steeped in the highs and lows inherent in the pursuit of love and creative expression.

Sue Mell writes fiction and creative nonfiction in both short and long forms. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Cleaver Magazine, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson and was a 2020 BookEnds fellow at SUNY Stony Brook. You can find more about Sue at www.suemell.com. She lives in Queens, New York, where she cares for her aging mom and a gray tuxedo cat named Poppy.