Excerpts from THE ASTERISMS have won national fiction prizes at Summer Literary Seminars and New Ohio Review. When 39-year-old Grace Deckel has an unplanned pregnancy and miscarriage, her family’s placid suburban life goes off the rails. Her husband Chuck suppresses his rage by stealing a rare toy replica of Wonder Woman’s airplane. Teenage son Russell seeks refuge at a summer job in a veterinarian’s office, where a predicted Rapture puts him in charge of the ownerless pets. Younger sister Jess falls in love with a Bosnian woman, whose physically dangerous performance art challenges Jess to defy her family role as the “Little Scorpion.” And Grace, an anesthesiologist, must investigate both her patient’s death and her parents’ unexplained disappearance before confronting her most urgent problem – whether reentering the world of parenthood is worth the upheaval of her identity, career, and marriage. At once inventive and tender, THE ASTERISMS shows us how to forge new, unorthodox configurations of relations and friends, ultimately transforming the gravity of loss into intimacy, maturity, and even joy.