Origami Dogs – Stories

"These tales highlight morally complex situations that don’t have easy solutions, and they don’t hide from the unpleasant truths of the characters. Reid allows them to make mistakes and bad decisions without losing sympathy or compassion for them. Most of all, these relatable stories manage to get to the heart of what it means to love, to be part of a family, and to continue on after tragedy. . . . An earnest and often affecting set of tales."

* Kirkus Reviews *
"Through Reid’s clean, often razor-sharp prose, the characters’ animal companions trudge alongside their emotional turmoil, both witnesses and hostages to the ways they love and harm each other. . . . The characters search, untiring, for the love they crave, whether from a distant partner or a conservative mother. When the narrator’s son returns in 'No Matter Her Leaving,' the piece—and by extension, the collection—ends on a note of hope. Brimming underneath, though, there is still the sense of something inherently tragic, in an unrelenting, animalesque sort of love." * Florida Review Online *
"In every story of Origami Dogs, Reid’s tenderness for her characters shines through, illuminating their beautiful yearning for connection, love, and acknowledgment. I read with my heart in my throat, eager to follow wherever Reid took me, and eager to linger with each character before they were gone." -- Gwen E. Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw
"Whether they’re breeding dogs or raising lambs, felling trees or crossing floodwaters, burning their dinners or falling in love with the wrong people, the everyday heroes of Origami Dogs tug on your heartstrings as they whisper their sweet, sad stories. You will fall in love with these people. You will fall in love with this book. The best collection yet by a master of the short story form." -- David James Poissant, author of Lake Life and The Heaven of Animals
"Origami Dogs folded my mind into a quivering heart. Within its pages, Reid captures contemporary society's terrible turbulence and grace-filled consolations like no one else. To borrow from one of Reid's own gems, these fierce stories are the bubbling, fiery, terrifying, gorgeous “innards of a volcano." -- Ethel Rohan, author of In the Event of Contact
"Reid's compassionate collection doesn’t shy away from the violent and grotesque, nor the intimate and beautiful. These stories are about pets, yes, but they’re also about people—about all of us, really—and how we navigate traumas created by ourselves and inflicted upon others, all while the animals in our lives watch with bewilderment. Always engaging and often harrowing, Origami Dogs delivers powerful stories that will stay with you long after you’ve read them." -- Michael X. Wang, Winner of the 2021 Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collec