Finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction, and the Foreword INDIES Awards. The fourteen stories in  Every Human Love  redefine our sense of reality. Set seemingly in the quotidian, these tales veer into the unexpected, the uncomfortable, occasionally the eerie, thrusting characters in crisis into still greater quandaries, where the world of weddings and work, of frustrated hopes and mundane dissatisfactions, collides with a realm of legend, of fairy tale, of nightmare. Pearson's stories are meticulously written, with layers that are incrementally and patiently revealed. Her voice nimbly creates a sense of strangeness and detachment without ever lapsing into coldness, providing a remarkable sense of continuity across a diverse array of characters and settings. At the heart of this collection are questions about how people can survive circumstances that demand hard choices without losing faith in everything in their lives up to that critical juncture. Intriguing and satisfying. --Kirkus Reviews Imaginative and haunting, Every Human Love is a masterful collection of short stories by Joanna Pearson, written with insight and empathy. . . .there's a strength, a lucidity, and a brilliance that shimmers and enchants. --Foreword Reviews, starred review Joanna Pearson 's debut novel, BRIGHT AND TENDER DARK, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2024. Her second short story collection, NOW YOU KNOW IT ALL (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), was chosen by Edward P. Jones for the 2021 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and named a finalist for the 2022 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. Her first short story collection, EVERY HUMAN LOVE (Acre Books, 2019) was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction, and the Foreword INDIES Awards. Her fiction has appeared in various journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Ecotone, Kenyon Review , Sewanee Review , Subtropics , as well as others, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories , The Best American Mystery and Suspense , The Best Small Fictions , and Best of the Net.   Originally from western North Carolina, she now lives with her husband and two daughters near Chapel Hill, where she works as a psychiatrist.