Small Hot Rooms

In her debut story collection, Small Hot Rooms, Liz Solms intimately explores rooms within as well as rooms without. Here, swimming pools, dusty vehicles, women with children, women without, island life, city life, life on vacation, and life at work all create moments for close examination and discovery. Each story briefly illuminates the situations and feelings we might otherwise dismiss without examining their beauty or meaning. From Philadelphia to Jamaica, New Orleans, to Amsterdam, each story operates almost like a poem, pinning down-just for a moment-a sense of great shifting rootlessness.

"Solms writes with deceptive simplicity of the interplay between place and psyche with a striking keenness, taking us in and out of the rooms that characters form and are formed by... in a manner that is at once quiet and breathtaking." -Meghan Gilliss, Author of Lungfish

"In a Liz Solms story, place is paramount. Heat is a character; menacing, embracing, searing and all encompassing. Water, too, has the power of a person, something that entrances, destroys, and bears life. These elegant tales defy orderly endings and opt for open-ended mystery and new wonder. Wrought in precise and wholly original language, this is a transcendent debut; a voice to make note of and celebrate." -Thea Goodman, author of The Sunshine When She's Gone and The Invented Mother

"Solms's mastery of language, again and again, will carry you away." -Benjamin Anastas, author of Too Good to Be True

Liz Solms has spent most of her adult life in Jamaica, West Indies. She now splits her time between Jamaica and New Orleans. A two time Pushcart Prize nominee, Liz holds an MFA from Bennington College. Liz's writing has appeared in Post Road, Wasafiri, The Village Voice, War Literature & The Arts, Diner Journal, and Reed Magazine, among other publications. She has been the finalist for multiple literary prizes, and Small Hot Rooms is her debut collection.