Rages and Other Cages

Joyce Carol Oates calls LaBrie’s writing ＂Mordantly funny, eerily discomforting, & unexpectedly wise -- an audacious gathering of stories mirroring our contemporary world.＂

In her award-winning collection of short stories, Rage and Other Cages, LaBrie offers lessons on grief, loneliness, and relationships that examine what it means to be female in today’s America.

The characters range from a former child actress turned real estate agent who yearns for her past, to a nurse who must convince a murderer to donate his girlfriend’s organs, to a bartender at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar who is kidnapped by a customer searching for a mysterious key. Bad dates, bad jobs, and bad situations force these characters to use their wits and wiles to survive. In a voice akin to Lorrie Moore meets Mary Gaitskill, LaBrie has her readers laughing on one page and raging on another. Her voice is memorable, raw, and undeniably skillful.

Aimee LaBrie’s short stories have appeared in the Minnesota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Permafrost Magazine, and others. In 2020, her short story ＂Rage＂ won first place in Solstice Literary Magazine’s Annual Literary Contest and her novel in progress won the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award. In 2007, her short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published in a small print run (University of North Texas Press 2007). Her short fiction has been nominated four times for Pushcart Prizes. In 2012 she won first place in the Zoetrope: All-Story’s Short Fiction Competition. Aimee teaches creative writing at Rutgers and works as the senior program administrator for Writers House.