In all twenty-three stories from Emma Smith-Stevens’s collection, Greyhounds, characters examine their need for connection as well as self-reflection and solitude. Whether within a relationship, a family or as individuals, these characters try to understand, shape, control, or create connections with each other while grappling with their often-flawed understandings of themselves. Smith-Stevens takes these seemingly conflicting needs and makes a rich and diverse collection of short stories.
In “Heart Condition,” the fourth-grade protagonist is jealous of her severely ill, neurodivergent classmate Rhonda’s experience with adversity. And when Rhonda tells her about her heart condition, the protagonist lies and says she has one too. “My lie shocked me,” she thinks. But she doesn’t admit to the lie. The story is a clear examination of privilege, but also a disturbingly relatable impulse to absorb someone else’s identity instead of understanding her own.
To make a cinematic comparison, the story “I Scream” is a racier and more complex version of “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” where the friends have been having no-strings-attached sex for years: “This meant we were getting laid a lot and laughing hard and felt mutual affection and camaraderie in our singledom…Often we would remark upon how lucky we were to have found such enjoyment with something undeniably less than what we both deeply desired.” But when the protagonist’s friend gets engaged and then married, she must confront their no-strings arrangement as well as the feelings she has developed for him. While it’s easy to imagine her wishing she’d married him, this story isn’t so simple. We end up asking if she’s mourning lost chances at a classic relationship or the lost balance she’d had between community and solitude.
“Storybook” is divided between the stories of a prison inmate, Cortese, and a receptionist, Lynn, who are brought together for a project called “Mission Storybook.” As a way to cleanse her self-image, Lynn volunteers to film inmates reading bedtime stories that will be sent to their children. She’s an unlikely volunteer for this kind of project because she finds children unnerving and is constantly reminded of the “generalized alienation that defined all of her relationships.” Lynn’s feelings of alienation contrast Cortese’s intense desire to connect with his daughters despite the prison walls separating him from all of his relationships. It’s a touching story that will break a book lover’s heart.
The collection is a mix of traditionally structured short stories and flash fiction that veers into genre-blurring and experimental prose. This combination of styles strikes at the core of our beliefs about self-understanding, not just questioning the honesty of the stories we tell ourselves, but also the appropriateness of how we tell them.
The progression of the first four stories in the collection illustrates this dichotomy. In the first story, “Switch,” we follow Jan, a student who’s discovering her sexuality and herself through S&M in a submissive relationship with Mike.
Before Mike, Jan used to wonder if she was the only thing that was real, and if everything and everyone else was a figment of her imagination. Now people have secrets and insides and world of their own. Lines are crisp, yet there is a penetrability to the world around her, and Jan skirts along the edges of boundaries, pressing herself against the divides between people and objects and other people.
This, of course, isn’t the end. Both Jan’s desires and Mike’s behavior change, troubling her newfound clarity and focus. “Switch” is a short story with a classic formula in which the unfolding of outside events and internal developments force the characters into a change that upends the world they’ve created. It has a clear beginning, middle and end.
The next two stories get shorter and weirder. “An August in the Early 2000s” follows a dysfunctional couple who get a pair of fighting fish to act as avatars for their own pent-up anger. From a psychiatric hospital, the protagonist in “Some Ongoing Etc.” meditates on a moment during her wedding that altered her perception of time and the events in her life. Her doctors call it an episode, but for her it’s a transformation, one that troubles her story’s timeline, making the events leading to the climax non-linear.
Then we reach the more experimental prose of the collection’s eponymous story “Greyhounds.”
When James bites his nails. When James kisses a woman. When James uses drugs. When James beats off to the rit-rit-rit of a jack-hammer. When James eats something sweet enough to hurt his teeth. When James bites his lip. When James holds his breath. When James’s thoughts are like greyhounds.
Every sentence in this short piece is a dependent clause left on its own and each one races by before we can fully absorb the previous one. In that way, the style fits the protagonist, whose “thoughts are like greyhounds.” Initially, this makes the reader ask a question after reading each sentence. What happens when James bites his nails? And when he kisses a woman? And when he uses drugs? But after a few lines, we stop asking questions and we fill in the blanks ourselves. By the time we read “when James remembers painful shit and walks quickly into the snow and starts running,” we stop filling in the blanks and just see James running from his pain and almost certainly hurting himself worse in the process. By the end of the story, we’re reading the incomplete as complete. We believe we understand someone even though half of their story is invisible.
This doesn’t just bring into question people’s mental capacity to understand themselves. It also questions how they understand themselves. Self-awareness isn’t just a question of knowing the content of our lives, it’s also a question of knowing how to present it. Style is just as substantial as theme.
The final story, aptly named “Anthem,” is a listing story where sentences start with “There are boys who,” “There are girls who,” or “There are boys and girls who.” Each sentence describes a new character and a new set of lives: “There are boys and girls who say, I feel like something’s going to happen. There are the boys and girls, so many of them—there are packs of them, swarms of them, hanging low to the ground, misting over the city like fountain-spray carried by the breeze over a park.”
It’s almost as if Smith-Stevens wanted to end her collection of stories with a piece that is itself a collection of stories. The boys and girls come in packs, swarms and mists; each collective noun putting new emphasis on Greyhounds’s diversity of characters and styles, all seeking to connect to others. Whether the stories are classic or experimental, they don’t fail to make a connection with the reader. You’ll finish Greyhounds with the feeling all its characters seek: the melancholy warmth of solitude after communion with others.
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Publication Date: October 27, 2026
Reviewed by David Lewis
David Lewis’s writing has appeared in The Weird Fiction Review, Joyland, Strange Horizons, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Ancillary Review of Books, The Ghost Story, Dark Horses and others. His unpublished short story collection, Ten Little Deaths, was a finalist for the Steel Toe Books Prose Prize and the George Garrett Fiction Prize. Originally from Oklahoma, he now lives in France with his husband and dog. You can find him and links to his publications at daviddaviddavid.com.