Winner of the 2025 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, Equipment for Lovers explores strangers and strangeness in twelve intimate, uncanny stories perfect for fans of Don DeLillo and Torrey Peters

A self-help group for people with fears of the apocalypse meets in an abandoned warehouse, where one member discovers she can banish the others' phobias. A six-foot wrench called "The Persuader" moves from branch to branch in a family, lurking under a girl's bed until the night it's needed. A sadomasochistic couple wrestles with intimacy after one of them is diagnosed with life-threatening cancer. A teenager grapples with his homosexuality and his mother's disappearance in junta-controlled Argentina. And a man and his boyfriend, driving through northern Maine, find a woman bent in the middle of the dark road-an encounter that pushes the night into strangeness as if down a rabbit hole.

With their trademark deftness, Crouse's fifth collection returns to themes of alienation and identity, delivered with an ever-sharper edge. These are stories spilling over with compassion and outrage and bittersweet understanding, a must-read for admirers of Rachel Aviv and Anthony Veasna So.