The Great Grown-up Game of Make-Believe

"Beautifully strange and incredibly satisfying." -Kristen Arnett

Winner of the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize, these lyrical, haunting stories invite us to question the stories we tell ourselves and to imagine other paths-joyful, whimsical, even absurd-through the world.

A wife finds herself literally shrinking in her house, day by day; a mother recalls the surreal day when her infant daughter survives a close encounter with a bear; and, inside her lover's heart, a woman discovers a secret nightclub populated by all the women he's loved and left.

In the worlds, Woods conjures, childhood memories ripple through adult lives, and characters test the limits of their self-created realities. The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believeurges us to contemplate how we can escape loneliness and heartbreak and live on our own terms.