Requiem by Teresa Carmody is a "folk opera, a lament for the unexamined life," writes editor and author David Ulin in his Introduction. In this short collection of fiction, a lonely man plainchants for the waitress he once stalked, a sonless father serenades a fatherless son, and a bereft family gathers to bury a parent, providing an aching chorus of what is left. Carmody uses Biblical language to pierce the callous and bruised souls of these lost, and sometimes found, small-town Michiganders. In her raw spare stories, novelist, essayist, and poet Carol Muske-Dukes writes that Carmody creates in her raw, spare stories, “a voice out of the backyard burning bush, a Midwest scriptural mist: frank, fierce and fidgety, and most emphatically her own.” Teresa Carmody (she/they) writes fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. Their books include Maison Femme: a fiction (Bon Aire Projects, 2015), The Reconception of Marie (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), and A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others (Autofocus Books, 2025). Their writing was selected for the &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing (2009) and by Entropy for its Best Online Articles and Essays list of 2019. The Reconception of Marie was also a finalist for the 2020 Big Other Fiction Award and a Reader’s Choice Award. Lucy Ives selected their story “Work Friends, or the Elements of Fiction Make a Story GoGo” as Fugue ’s 2024 Prose Contest Runner-Up.