Thanks for This Riot
Winner of the 2023 Book Prize in Fiction
The winner of the 2023 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction is Janelle Bassett for her manuscript “Thanks for This Riot,” chosen by guest judges Cecily Wong and De’Shawn Charles Winslow with Kwame Dawes, Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner. She will receive a $3,000 award and publication by the University of Nebraska Press.
Wong praised Bassett’s stories, noting that her “writing is energetic, hilarious and sharp-witted. The manuscript felt like a voyeuristic peek into the mind of someone who, hard as they try, cannot tame their rowdy opinions—like trailing a loveable friend that can’t be trusted in public.”
Bassett’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, New Delta Review, Smokelong Quarterly, American Literary Review, The Offing, Washington Square Review, Wigleaf and Best Microfiction. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and is a fiction editor at Split Lip Magazine.
About the Book
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Thanks for This Riot explores the limits of kindness, the weight of being needed, and the fear of being misunderstood. A group counselor is taunted by a truth-divining piano bench, a voice actor shouts her abortion at the state capitol, a tired caregiver tangles with a pair of stand-up comics, a small-town newspaper office shelters an otherworldly tattletale, a backwoods acupuncturist leans on her least-exciting offspring, a girl in a strapless bra takes a vengeful go-kart ride, and a woman gets surgery to lower her expectations (she thinks it went “okay”). Grouped by types of riot—external riots, internal riots, and laugh riots—Thanks for This Riot is a poignant and mordantly funny collection with a distinctly feminist viewpoint.
Praise
“An acerbic examination of family and femininity.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Bassett never writes a judgmental line—if you are looking for irony or eye rolls, they are not here. Her stories play in shadows without being dark or blindly optimistic. Accept that people and their flaws make a flawed world. There’s nothing to be gained by standing in the spotlight; make whimsey in the shade—it’s way more fun.” —Jeannine Burgdorf, Masters Review
“Janelle Bassett’s voice is one I can’t get enough of. The stories in Thanks for This Riot are fresh and unique and wickedly off-kilter but also burn with a wry, age-old, ironic wisdom. This collection is bitingly funny but sincerely so, with little lies and harmless untruths taking on an edge and inflicting irresistible damage.” —Timothy Schaffert, author of The Perfume Thief and The Titanic Survivors Book Club
“Janelle Bassett is a phenomenal writer. These stories are smart, irreverent, hilarious, and so wonderfully intimate. It is rare to find a writer who can balance humor with such earnest human emotion, and Bassett does it on every page. This collection is gold.” —Alison Espach, author of Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance and The Wedding People
“Janelle Bassett’s writing is hilarious, intense, and alive. Every story in this collection is off-kilter in the best possible way. The characters are all trying to make sense of themselves in a world that doesn’t fit quite right. Reading this felt like being tickled forcefully, laughing even as it got uncomfortable.” —Katya Apekina, author of Mother Doll and The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish
