Woods

Janice Obuchowski’s fiction has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse,Alaska Quarterly Review, Story, Conjunctions online, and LitHub. Previously a fiction editor at New England Review, she lives in Middlebury, Vermont.

“In Janice Obuchowski’s stories, the woods surrounding a Vermont college town are as suffused with mystery and dread as any forest found in the Brothers Grimm. The characters adrift in these woods are viscerally alive and heartbreakingly real as they search for a route back to the world they knew. By situating the universal experience of bewilderment within one specifically observed woods, Obuchowski has crafted a genuine work of art.”—Anthony Marra, judge, John Simmons Short Fiction Award “The Woods is a smart, moving collection—descriptive, evocative—with rich and believable worlds for readers to immerse themselves in.”—Megan Mayhew Bergman, author, How Strange a Season “I was happy to be lost in the shadows, clearings, and tangled vines of these stories—each is generous, funny, and beautifully precise, and together they make something gorgeous. I am Janice Obuchowski’s great big fan.”—Ramona Ausubel, author, Awayland “Janice Obuchowski’s stories place us in a very particular world, the world of college town Vermont, where intellect rules but The Woods summon, her narrators like woodland sirens. We meet people at both ends of life—young academics and those looking back from retirement—as well as locals making sense of their changing communities, all of them lured to the liminal space of the woods. In beautiful, compelling, precise prose, Obuchowski observes the human ability to go on in the face of the unknown, the regretted, the unexpected, and, perhaps most important, the unchangeable. As with all the best fables, one thinks: don’t go into the woods. But of course you must.”—Lori Ostlund, author, After the Parade“Janice Obuchowski’s voice—deliberate, lucid, arrestingly authoritative—is a pleasure; with a careful eye and generous measured style she renders a Vermont landscape and its inhabitants. With its cast of recurring characters, and exquisite attention to place, this collection calls to mind Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge”—Amanda Coplin, author, The Orchardist“These are such richly inhabited storyworlds, tottering between the wild and the civilized, peeking into places made stunningly lucid with language but still mysterious in the way the natural world is mysterious. What a thrilling debut!”—Aimee Bender, author, The Butterfly Lampshade"Obuchowski’s lucid debut collection digs into the isolation and complexities of her characters’ inner worlds... evocative interior descriptions and subtle revelations about the characters’ relationships to place.”—Publishers Weekly“When you look closely enough at a place, you might begin noticing things that don’t quite mesh with your understanding of the world. Think most folk horror; think Twin Peaks. Janice Obuchowski’s new collection The Woods heads into a suburban Gothic space, with some of its stories populated by ghosts and strange creatures.”—Tor.com