Seventh in our series of fiction by never-before-published authors, this bracing story-monologue is part primer, part cautionary tale.
CONTENTS +
New Voices: “How to Win in Reno”
By Kelly Sandoval; photograph by Lisa Kereszi
“If they’re drinking bourbon with their orange juice, they won’t be tipping. You learn that the first time you work graveyard and discover that some of the regulars never go home. You learn it then because no one will teach you; after the first night of following nervously behind one of the more experienced girls, you’re on your own. If you run into a problem, improvise.”
Kelly Sandoval is a speculative fiction author whose stories have appeared in Uncanny, Strange Horizons, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. The author of the interactive novel Runt of the Litter (Choice of Games, 2017), Sandoval is also one of the senior editors and publishers of Liminal Stories, an online literary magazine.
Pennsylvania native Lisa Kereszi graduated from Bard College with a double major in Photography and Literature/Creative Writing in 1995. She received her M.F.A. from Yale in 2000. Represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, Kereszi lives in New Haven, CT, where she is on the faculty at the Yale School of Art. She was appointed Critic and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art in 2013 and a Senior Critic in 2019. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum, as well as in many private collections. Her book on striptease, Fantasies, was published by Damiani in 2008; Nazraeli Press published Fun and Games in 2009.