“In Erin Pringle’s breathtaking story collection UNEXPECTED WEATHER EVENTS ghosts arrive on wintry nights, the sky bleeds red snow, a hole opens up between heaven and hell, and characters learn to grieve, to laugh, to love, even as the harrowing world around them shudders and quakes with loss. The themes and tone in these pages—at turns deadpan and compassionate, always wise and complex—converse beautifully with the fiction of Miriam Toews and Agota Kristof. This book reminded me: We are not alone in our sorrow; there are always new ways—even in a petrifying darkness—to see and to love.”

“The perfectly paced, lyrical stories in Erin Pringle’s UNEXPECTED WEATHER EVENTS deeply and deftly explore how, after personal tragedy, beautiful
images can not only save us but also keep us tethered to the world.”

“Erin Pringle is my favorite living author. This breathtaking new collection more than solidifies that opinion. Her writing is soul-rich with wonder and terror, tapping into a child’s dream-like experience of family, change, and death. These are not only stories; each piece is a spell swirling with grief, love, and the bitter-strong beauty of being alive.”

“Reading UNEXPECTED WEATHER EVENTS is like looking into a snow so mesmerizing and crystalline you are unable to turn away, at once illuminated and profoundly lost. They are stories of winter madness—troubling, tender, and hallucinatory—stories of connection and misconnection, of love and grief and isolation in the increasingly dangerous and tenuous reality of our contemporary condition.”

“Erin Pringle crafts an immersive, vivid world where time can linger, sit down, or turn itself inside out as characters survive the beautiful complications and layers of their lives. These stories visit the tender space between the living and the dead, between right now and memory, between reality and dreams. There are ghosts and shadows and memories and forewarnings as the people inside these stories face the hardest parts of being human—climate change, cancer, suicide, war—while finding love and meaning in the sweet impermanence of safety.”

“Deep, rich, and beautiful— Erin Pringle has a knack for capturing the details of daily life as those lives are forever altered: the smell of snow, the surprise cancer diagnosis, the joy of valentines. the lost father, new boyfriend, meanness and kindness, With these stories, she brings clarity to chaos, light into darkness.”

“In prose rich in metaphor, Pringle masterfully and hauntingly narrates the interior lives of children and adults facing life’s greatest struggles. Pringle’s characters are inspiring and courageous as they encounter unthinkable catastrophes. In these stories, we see from the eyes of children watching a parent die from cancer, witnessing a parent’s ongoing struggle with mental illness and the debilitating effects of medication, and experiencing a holocaust-like mass killing of residents in their town. We see adult characters who escaped horrific childhoods question the viability of their own happy lives to the point that everything begins to crumble. Pringle’s stories deftly and unsentimentally address heartbreaking and sometimes taboo topics like the grief of miscarriage and the destructive force of homophobia. Often, the lines between reality and delusion blur, and the reader becomes unnervingly ensnared in the protagonist’s confusion. Many of the stories are quintessentially Midwestern, infused with wide cornfields and an ethos of practicality and personal limitation that is brought into stark relief by Pringle’s uncritical presentation. Pringle’s many gifts as a writer are in full force here. Particularly striking is Pringle’s ability to powerfully and convincingly evoke a child’s point of view. As always, Pringle’s work will break you open and at the same time fortify you.”