Rage and Other Cages: A Selection of Short Stories

In her award-winning collection of short stories, Rage and Other Cages, Aimee LaBrie offers lessons on grief, loneliness, and relationships that examine what it means to be female in today’s America.

The characters range from a former child actress turned real estate agent who yearns for her past, to a nurse who must convince a murderer to donate his girlfriend’s organs, to a bartender at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar who is kidnapped by a customer searching for a mysterious key. Bad dates, bad jobs, and bad situations force these characters to use their wits and wiles to survive. In her memorable, raw voice akin to Lorrie Moore meets Mary Gaitskill, LaBrie has her readers laughing on one page and raging on another.

Joyce Carol Oates calls LaBrie’s writing “Mordantly funny, eerily discomforting, & unexpectedly wise — an audacious gathering of stories mirroring our contemporary world.”

Aimee LaBrie’s short stories have appeared in the Minnesota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Permafrost Magazine, and others. In 2020, her short story “Rage” won first place in Solstice Literary Magazine’s Annual Literary Contest and her novel in progress won the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer Award. Her short fiction has been nominated four times for Pushcart Prizes. In 2012 she won first place in the Zoetrope: All-Story’s Short Fiction Competition. Aimee teaches creative writing at Rutgers and works as the senior program administrator for Writers House.  Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Prix Femina, and the Cino Del Duca World Prize. She has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and the New York Times best seller The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University.

This event is cosponsored by Labyrinth Books,  Princeton University Humanities Council, The Lewis Center for the Arts, Rutgers University’s Department of English, and the Writers House at Rutgers.