Nadia: Excerpted from The Mothers

“The title character of Brit Bennett’s story is adrift. Stunned by the death of her mother, and unsure how to move through the world without her, Nadia rides the bus, fake ID in tow, hoping to stumble across a place or a person that might allow her to feel something, anything other than the hurt that threatens to suffocate her. She winds up in a run-down strip joint, and in the first of what will be many attempts at intervention from older, well-meaning women, is saved from a night that might have ended in tragedy. “Nadia” is a story about the ways that grief can send you reeling, and how the people we meet during grief’s bleakest moments can feel like the antidote to our pain, a solution to the unsolvable problem of loss.” - Angela Flournoy About the Author: Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Her work is featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. She is one of the National Book Foundation’s 2016 5 Under 35 honorees. About the Guest Editor: Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times notable book of the year. She is a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree for 2015. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Flournoy is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Southern California. About the Publisher: Recommended Reading is the weekly fiction magazine of Electric Literature, publishing here every Wednesday morning. In addition to featuring our own recommendations of original, previously unpublished fiction, we invite established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommend great work from their pages, past and present. Follow Recommended Reading on Medium and never miss the latest issue, or become a member for full access to the archives. For other links from Electric Literature, follow us, or sign up for our eNewsletter.