Winner of the 2021 Chapbook Open

Lindy Biller

Read Matt Bell’s introduction here.

Read a sample of Lindy’s fiction in New Voices.

You can purchase a copy of Love at the End of the World from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

About the Author

LINDY BILLER is a writer based in Wisconsin. Her work has been selected as the winner of the 2021 Fractured Literary Flash Fiction Contest and nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and The Pushcart Prize. Her stories can be found in The Masters Review, Chestnut Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Cheap Pop, Longleaf Review, and Necessary Fiction, among others. Find her online at lindybiller.com.

Praise for Love at the End of the World

“The first thing I noticed about Lindy Biller’s stories was their confidence. Story after story, Biller launches into her tales with lines evocative enough to suggesting an entire scene at once: “It’s four in the morning, and the giraffes are fighting,” she writes in the opening of “This Was Never Ours,” one of my early favorites from this collection, and where else could I possibly want to be after that but there, finding out what happens next?… Lindy Biller’s Love at the End of the World, which I was thrilled to choose as this year’s winner, is a book full of clear invitations and provocations, surprises and thrills. Biller’s stories are frequently about motherhood and childhood and identity, about the ways our changing identities affect the way we see the world around us; Biller switches up form and voice and point of view with ease, showing off an enviable range throughout the collection. I hope you’ll find her excellent stories as thrillingly bittersweet as I did. I have no doubt that they will gift you all the wonder and joy you could want, as they did me on my first read and every read since.”

—Matt Bell, Guest Judge, author of Appleseed, Scrapper, and A Tree or a Person or a Wall

“Lindy Biller’s Love at the End of the World is a revelation. Filled with the grace and grief of life, its uncanny abundance and its haunting losses, this collection of stories is empathetic, endlessly imaginative, and formally adventurous. At once precise and expansive, humorous and heartfelt, Biller’s prose will leave you more attuned to the stubborn wonder and complexities of love and being alive, together and alone. As its title suggests, hope and sorrow exist as neighbors, deepened and amplified by each other. Biller’s collection proves that flash fiction is both a miraculous moment and the glorious tail of a comet, lingering in your mind and in the world long after it has streaked across the page.”

—K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary, Gods of Want, and Bone House  

“In her prize-winning debut collection, Lindy Biller writes whimsy and wonder through glittering skeletons, a crying glacier, mittens made from someone else’s sweater, marigolds, monarch butterflies, a boy named Ham fighting giraffes, a pinkish-cheeked doctor. Against her memorable backdrops and characters, Biller weaves threads of religion and motherhood and life. There’s dimension and identifiability in her words, an intentional surreality that softens serious subjects and makes ordinary things and people – extraordinary. Readers will be drawn to her collection’s end and back again, as Biller’s world and people building infuses love throughout.”

—Amy Barnes, author of Mother Figures, Ambrotypes, and Child Craft

“Love at the End of the World will leave you breathless and yearning for more. Lindy Biller deftly weaves these seemingly separate narratives into a tapestry of climate change and the rapture, astronauts and delivery drivers, mothers and children, gorgeous fractal patterns, circling back again and again, expanding and contracting with each wondrous story.”

—Melissa Llanes Brownlee, author of Hard Skin and Kahi and Lua