Equipment for Lovers - by David Nikki Crouse (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2025 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, Equipment for Lovers explores strangers and strangeness in twelve intimate, uncanny stories perfect for fans of Don DeLillo and Torrey Peters

A self-help group for people with fears of the apocalypse meets in an abandoned warehouse, where one member discovers she can banish the others' phobias. A six-foot wrench called "The Persuader" moves from branch to branch in a family, lurking under a girl's bed until the night it's needed. A sadomasochistic couple wrestles with intimacy after one of them is diagnosed with life-threatening cancer. A teenager grapples with his homosexuality and his mother's disappearance in junta-controlled Argentina. And a man and his boyfriend, driving through northern Maine, find a woman bent in the middle of the dark road--an encounter that pushes the night into strangeness as if down a rabbit hole.

With their trademark deftness, Crouse's fifth collection returns to themes of alienation and identity, delivered with an ever-sharper edge. These are stories spilling over with compassion and outrage and bittersweet understanding, a must-read for admirers of Rachel Aviv and Anthony Veasna So.

Review Quotes

"Nikki Crouse writes scenes like a symphonist. Their dialogue, both revelatory and original, reveals characters captured at the peak of indecision, echoing our own desperate fears and desires. The reader fortunate enough to come across Crouse's stories will be forced to consider the weight of a single moment, and whether or not we can ever see it that way again."--Patrick Dacey, Author of Once More Before It's Too Late

Praise for I'm Here: Alaska Stories

"The landscape that emerges in David Nikki Crouse's I'm Here: Alaska Stories is one of rough-hewn beauty, fitted out with unforgettable characters who have gotten themselves into trouble of their own making. In these masterful stories, setting serves as a window to the human heart, reminding us that to ask, 'Where are you from?' is really to ask, 'Who are you?' An outstanding collection."--Anthony Varallo, author of What Did You Do Today?

About the Author

David Nikki Crouse is the author of Copy Cats, The Man Back There, Trouble Will Save You, and I'm Here: Alaska Stories. Their work has been awarded the Flannery O'Connor Award in Short Fiction, the Mary McCarthy Prize, the Lawrence Prize, the Witness Short Fiction Award, and other recognitions. They live in Seattle, Washington, where they teach at the University of Washington-Seattle and serve as the W. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor in Creative Writing.