From the winner of the 2016 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction comes a "heartwarming and sharp-witted debut" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) set over one emotionally charged weekend at an animal sanctuary in western Kansas, where maternal, romantic, and community bonds are tested in the wake of an estranged daughter's homecoming. The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals is in trouble. It's late 2016 when Ariel discovers that her mother Mona's animal sanctuary in Western Kansas has not only been the target of anti-Semitic hate crimes--but that it's also for sale, due to hidden financial ruin. Ariel, living a new life in progressive Lawrence, and estranged from her mother for six long years, knows she has to return to her childhood home--especially since her own past may have played a role in the attack on the sanctuary. Ariel expects tension, maybe even fury, but she doesn't anticipate that her first love, a ranch hand named Gideon, will still be working at Bright Side. Back in Lawrence, Ariel's charming but hapless fiance, Dex, grows paranoid about her sudden departure. After uncovering Mona's address, he sets out to confront Ariel, but instead finds her grappling with the life she's abandoned. Amid the reparations with her mother, it's clear that Ariel is questioning the meaning of her life in Lawrence, and whether she belongs with Dex or someone else, somewhere else. Acclaimed writer Pam Houston says that "Mandelbaum is wise beyond her years and twice as talented," and The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals poignantly explores the unique love and tension between mothers and daughters, and humans and animals alike. "A story of reconciliation and forgiveness (and so many animals)" (Steven Rowley, bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus), Mandelbaum's debut offers a panoramic view of the meaning of home and reminds us that love provides refuge, and underscores our similarities as human beings, no matter how alone or far apart we may feel.

These stories offer layered, perceptive takes on what home means to us. The people we meet in these stories are often traveling to and from home-thinking about where they have come from, where they are headed, and how that journey will impact their futures. Although the stories approach homecoming and homesickness through varied moods and styles, they all come around to confronting a shared need: a place to call home.

These stories amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. Even though holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories challenge traditional associations. Each story serves to complicate how we observe the human observation of holidays and offers a nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory. More generally, holidays are days of observance, and that aspect alone offers a lot to unpack.

The eleven beautifully crafted stories in Bad Kansas reveal the complicated underbelly of the country's most flown-over state and the quirky characters that call it home. In this darkly humorous collection, Kansas becomes a state of mind as Mandelbaum's characters struggle to define their relationship to home and what it means to stay or leave, to hold on or let go. When a desperate woman finds herself on a date with a rugged man she has nothing in common with, she must decide whether to sacrifice the life of a bear in order to keep the man's affection. After having a nightmare about a mallard, a young man wakes to discover he's choking the woman he loves. When his mother starts dating a slimy pizza parlor owner, a young boy must choose whether to align with his mischievous older brother or remain loyal to his mom. The deeply appealing and peculiar characters in Bad Kansas are determined to get what they want, be it love or sex or power, in a world intent on denying them.