Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive
If you haven’t heard of the Book Love Podcast, then you should start following them because my interview with Matt from Ohio is the best interview of my life.
“Together, we explore how horror, surrealism, and unsettling realism can reveal deeper truths about trauma, empathy, patriarchy, intrusive thoughts, and what it means to endure in the modern world. We also dive into the role of feminism in literature, the intersection of mental health and societal systems, the “male loneliness epidemic,” and how fiction can challenge the ways we understand both ourselves and each other. It’s a candid and honest conversation about storytelling, suffering, and the uncomfortable realities many people are forced to navigate every day.”
Listen here. Follow them on Instagram @booklove_podcast
robmclennan is a superstar in our community and I was honoured to be asked to participate in his 12 0r 20 (second series).
Canada Reads Inspired is a fantastic podcast hosted by Rebbecca and Tara, one American, one Canadian, who love Canada Reads.
6 Short Story Collections for Short Story Month
This debut takes my breath away. Characters driven to torment themselves and others. Gut-kick dialogue, funny and heartbreaking and real. Fierce love mixes with histories of damage, ongoing damage. Several of the nineteen stories have speculative elements, such as humanoids that (who?) continually seek more—power, intimacy, agency—as their wily owners struggle to defeat them.
Electric Literature included my little book on 15 Must-Read Small Press Books of Spring 2026!!!!!
Wendy J. Fox writes: “In this linked collection of speculative fiction, an accountant who is learning to swim is interrogated by her humanoid companion; a woman is unanchored in time and cannot remember giving birth to her daughter or even who she is; and in the title story, a couple argues incessantly and from such deep unhappiness the woman dreams hopefully of contracting a fatal tumor. Gadsby’s stories have simmering resentment, the cruelty of children, and the terror of never belonging as characters right alongside her unhappy people, threaded together with recurring themes. The effect is a glittering collection with high emotional tension.“ Especially that my name sits alongside Hollay Ghadery and Kim Fu….like what the actual?? If you know how much I have read Kim’s book, for a greater understanding of domestic horror, for her gift of dark characters doing impressively fucked up things, you will know why she’s one of go-to short story writers!
Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive as chosen as a Spring 2026 title on CBC Books Canadian Fiction list!!!
“Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive is a collection of short stories brimming with elements of psychological realism, horror and speculative fiction, all tied together by the different types of life-altering love.”
Please check out the Upcoming Events for days/times you can join me in promoting (I mean celebrating…lol) this book!
In the miracle that is a first book, I am so excited that my collection of short stories was published by Guernica Editions in March 2026.
Writers I admire so much have shared their very kind words, and I am eternally grateful!
Halfway into the first page of this collection, I thought “what the hell is this?”. And then I couldn’t put the book down. Alison Gadsby has a flair for writing the gritty, weird and topsy-turvy of life. — Farzana Doctor, author of Seven and The Beauty of Us
These stories are a sometimes jarring, always hypnotic, staccato phase out of the world we know and simultaneously—through Gadsby’s deep rootedness to our reckless and remarkable humanity—a tether to it. Unforgettable. — Hollay Ghadery, author of The Unravelling of Ou and Widow Fantasies
Gadsby’s vivid prose simmers with quiet rage at the ordinariness of violence, the casualness of cruelty, and the normalcy of misogyny. There is something electric running through these subtly linked stories – don’t be surprised when they leave you feeling lit up. — Anuja Varghese, author of Chrysalis and A Kiss of Crimson Ash
Searingly sharp, intricately constructed, and hugely original, BREATHING IS HOW SOME PEOPLE STAY ALIVE takes you down into the viscera of life while showing you just what the world is today. It’s an unforgettable read and an unforgettable experience. — Damian Tarnopolsky, author of Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster
With razor sharp sentences and a deeply compassionate heart, Alison Gadsby’s stories unfold to reveal beautiful and startling truths that stay with the reader long after the reading is done. — Carleigh Baker, author of Last Woman and Bad Endings
Reviews
Natalia Yanchak for the Montreal review of Books: “Gadsby’s writing is clean, sharp, and direct. Her words are driven and uplifting despite the emotionally complex and difficult themes the reader is exposed to. It would be unfair to characterize the collection as negative. The stories remain hopeful and strangely optimistic, and underline the power of even a small change. Many are stories of survival, tales of escape, of finding freedom and resolution, or of folks simply taking a moment to allow themselves to come up for air.” Read More.
Joy Farrell, Joy Reads Books: “Alison Gadsby truly excels at inviting us into the inner lives of women, not at their best or most achieved, but when their sexuality turns them to brutes and their apathy is intent on destroying all that is good around them. Anger and retributive violence are made available to women’s curiosity in “Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive”” Read More.
Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive blurs the lines between horror, catastrophic speculative fiction, and psychological realism in a collection that might best be described as weird fiction. These connected stories offer dark reconstructions of lives brimming with desperate loneliness. They allow us to bear witness to the life-altering love of sisters, brothers, mothers… the life-altering love that buoys them as they struggle to stay afloat in the wake of childhoods they merely survived.
Order from your local bookstore now. I will be eternally grateful!
- In Canada, find your local book shop at IndieBookstores.ca
- In the US, find your local book shop at BookShop.org
- In the UK, request it from your local indie book shop.
A writer. 