I got to Nicola's about 45 minutes before last night's reading was scheduled and since I was bringing the author's book with me, felt the need to pick up something new. Not so surprisingly, I was looking for more 2016 short story collections that I'd yet to have picked up.
First I found one that wasn't even on my list, but it was up on the top of the shelves, face out--Alyson Foster's Heart Attack Watch (Bloomsbury, May), a hardcover. She's previously published a novel and this collection has some nice blurbs from Rebecca Lee, David James Poissant, E.J. Levy, Abbey Geni, as well as pre-pub words from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. I think the fact that I didn't have it on my list at all contributed to why I picked it up and carried it around at first, but I opened it up and read some opening sentences and a page of one story and liked what I was seeing.
One more made it out the door with me, John Keene's collection, Counternarratives: Stories 
and Novellas (New Directions, 2015). While this paperback came out this past May, the hardcover was originally published in 2015, so it's not part of my 2016 SSC haul, but it had people like Eula Biss, Blake Butler, and Ben Ehrenreich saying nice things on the back cover and a quick peek inside left me bewildered in only the best way.
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