She-Bear
Short stories by Evgenia Nekrasova
★ WINNER OF THE 2026 O. HENRY PRIZE FOR SHORT FICTION
Short stories by Evgenia Nekrasova
ORIGINAL TITLE: Золотинка
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Elena Shubina, 2023
288 PAGES
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Elena Shubina, 2023
288 PAGES
FULL ENGLISH TRANSLATION AVAILABLE
★ WINNER OF THE 2026 O. HENRY PRIZE FOR SHORT FICTION
“With every outing, she strays further and further away from the den but always returns. One day, for the first time in months, she sees a person in the distance. For a moment, she stops singing and gathering berries into a bottle, but then resumes her foraging and vocalizing and having filled up the bottle, comes back to the den.”
An award-winning collection that transforms post-Soviet everyday life into dark feminist myth.
Rooted in Slavic folklore but unmistakably contemporary, She-Bear explores motherhood, ethnic identity, domestic labor and female rage through stories where the fantastic erupts into ordinary life.
A teenage girl abducted by a bear gradually adapts to a terrifying new existence in a cave, in a tale that shifts from fairy tale to allegory of captivity and trauma. A Moscow wedding turns into pagan body horror as a bride wearing a traditional horned headdress becomes possessed by the archaic violence embedded within the ritual itself.
With incantatory repetitions, deadpan humor, internet-age language and lyrical brutality, Nekrasova creates a singular literary universe, where folklore becomes a tool for exposing the violence hidden within contemporary society. Winner of the 2026 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction.
Rooted in Slavic folklore but unmistakably contemporary, She-Bear explores motherhood, ethnic identity, domestic labor and female rage through stories where the fantastic erupts into ordinary life.
A teenage girl abducted by a bear gradually adapts to a terrifying new existence in a cave, in a tale that shifts from fairy tale to allegory of captivity and trauma. A Moscow wedding turns into pagan body horror as a bride wearing a traditional horned headdress becomes possessed by the archaic violence embedded within the ritual itself.
With incantatory repetitions, deadpan humor, internet-age language and lyrical brutality, Nekrasova creates a singular literary universe, where folklore becomes a tool for exposing the violence hidden within contemporary society. Winner of the 2026 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction.