Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet Volume III is now available for pre-order. Like the earlier volumes, this book includes 20 short stories by 20 writers set in 20 countries. Brenda Peynado’s story is set in the Dominican Republic.
Brenda Peynado’s stories have won an O. Henry Prize, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, a Dana Award, a Fulbright Grant to the Dominican Republic, a Vermont Studio Center Residency, and other prizes. Her work appears in The Georgia Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, Black Warrior Review, and other journals. She received her MFA at Florida State University and her PhD at the University of Cincinnati. She currently teaches at the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.
Comment on “The Great Escape”: I’ve always been fascinated by the metal grates on doors every time I visited family in the Dominican Republic. What did they keep out or in that you wouldn’t expect? Often I had family looking for the keys to let ourselves out at the end of a visit. One particularly forgetful aunt had us worried she would get locked inside. This story is an exaggeration of what would happen if someone lost their keys forever and refused to come out.
