Rebecca Bernard in conversation with Melissa Cundieff

A man recently released from Pr*son returns to the dating scene and struggles to find the right time to reveal his long-past M**der conviction. A grieving mother considers her own role in her son’s death. A boy enables the destructive addiction of the person he’s in love with. A dog, witness to his owner’s violent acts, begins to sweat. Each story in Rebecca Bernard’s Our Sister Who Will Not Die brings the reader face to face with the frailties of human character—and demonstrates how the yearning for love and connection allows beauty and resilience to emerge from darkness. In questioning traditional formulations of good and evil, Bernard’s stories ask us to recognize our own culpabilities and acknowledge our shared humanity. None of us is the worst thing we’ve ever done, these stories compel us to believe. Hope is always worth letting in.

Praise For…

“By carefully wielding the unexpected perspectives of her protagonists, [Bernard] creates a fascinating variety of ways to tell stories that engage risky narrative terrain.…[She] trains her clear-eyed focus onto her characters’ treacherous inner landscapes, neither absolving nor condemning their choices.” —Emily Choate, Chapter 16

“Rebecca Bernard plumbs her characters’ darkest moments to extract something compassionate and gleamingly alive. One after the next her stories astonished me with their humanity and raw courage.” —Lee Conell, author of The Party Upstairs

“These edgy, unflinching, yet compassionate stories plunge us deep into the complexity of messy lives, deep into the minds of people we might prefer to dismiss. These complicated people—deftly brought to life on these pages—are like those who live in the world around us. They may even be us.” —Leslie Pietrzyk, author of Admit This to No One

“I read Our Sister Who Will Not Die in one sitting, as if diving into dark waters. After each story, I resurfaced with a gasp, certain only that I must dive again, reach deeper. A dazzling darkness beckons at the heart of these stories. The people Bernard writes into existence have unsettled me deeply. I care about them with an intensity that stuns me.” —Miroslav Penkov, author of East of the West

“Rebecca Bernard’s stories are scary exactly the way real life would be scary if we were aware of how close we were to great joy or great horror every step we take. I constantly felt as if I were standing on the crumbling edge of a cliff, entranced by the breathtaking view.” —Tony Earley, author of Mr. Tall

“All real lives are full of dark instincts, lost chances, moments in which everything hangs in the balance, or tips sideways. We’re struck by chance, how one thing becomes another over a lifetime. Our Sister Who Will Not Die is all about these moments and connections: moments of grief but also loose threads that reconnect in a profound way. A truly great story collection.” —Scott Blackwood, author of See How Small

“If Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior and Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World had a lovechild, it would be Our Sister Who Will Not Die. Wild and subversive in the very best ways, these stories had me by the throat.” —Nick White, author of How to Survive a Summer

“This ambitious, daring story collection takes the reader to strange and unsettling places. Bernard explores, with great skill and unfailing compassion, subjects which many other writers would simply find too daunting to take on.” —Ian McGuire, author of The Abstainer

Rebecca Bernard’s debut collection of stories, Our Sister Who Will Not Die was selected by Nick White as the winner of the 2021 Non/Fiction Prize held by The Journal and was published by Mad Creek Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press in August 2022. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Colorado Review, and Wigleaf among other venues. She is an Assistant Professor at Angelo State University and serves as a Fiction Editor for The Boiler.

Melissa Cundieff is the author of Darling Nova, selected by Alberto Ríos for the 2017 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Best of the Net, Ninth Letter, among other places. Originally from Irving, Texas, she received her MFA from Vanderbilt and now lives in Saint Paul with her two kids, Wren and Leo. She teaches creative writing and literature at Macalester College.

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