Publisher: Cornerstone Press

Pub date: November 3, 2026

A young woman who has lost her half-sister in a tragic murder makes a decision that will doom a dog; a woman becomes obsessed with a cookie jar at an Airbnb; a woman in an interracial marriage returns to her hometown for the first time since she married and must confront what she was taught about race; a woman with unusual powers embeds pieces of dead creatures in the jewelry she creates. Featuring women on the borders, Kathleen Furin's stories show how a deepening understanding of inner truths can challenge one's social belonging, and how this tension between inner and outer selves serves or destroys. Grappling with complicity, the characters in The Loneliness of Glass struggle as they learn how an intent to "save" others is often fraught with hypocrisy and can lead to self-destruction.

Excerpt

Excerpted from “The Loneliness of Glass,” the title story in The Loneliness of Glass

Dead things called her—through scent, usually, although maybe just as often through a humming, a tingling under her skin, and maybe just as often through a humming she could hear. She wouldn’t be able to explain this if she had to. Since her death calls were a topic that she had never discussed with anybody, she’d never had to reason it out. It was clear enough to her that there was no sense to it.

Some dead things didn’t call her, of course. She would have gone insane years ago amid the constant cacophony. Sometimes she tried to categorize the things—never a human, not even when it had been her Tom, never anything bigger than a deer, rarely something of the sea.

She was a water-feeler. The minute she immersed herself in a body of water she could sense every living thing around her. Although this had been terrifying when she was a child, it, too, was useful, especially when the dead thing calling to her was submerged itself.

From a young age she’d had these gifts. Her own mother had panicked, the first time they’d gone down to the water and her mother had held her aloft over the brimming waves, dipping in her tiny toes. Claudine had kicked so furiously and made such a commotion that the clammers in their tall yellow boots had rushed over, certain Claudine’s mother must be abusing her somehow. That poor woman. She never could handle Claudine, had no idea what kind of an energetic something she’d brought into the world. Her mom had kept her away from the water after that, but they’d moved out to the island when Claudine was seven years old, and there’d been no avoiding it since.

Claudine would never forget her first experience of wading into the water as a young girl. At first she’d felt a sensation like a fountain of frigid water being tossed at her back, constant, furious; then she’d felt movement and pulse all around her. She’d scurried out, terrified of the crabs she could feel burrowed nearby, the way they scuttled and waved, as if they were saying hello hello, ostensibly welcoming her in but really just making fun of her behind her back, like the girls at her new school. But she’d taught herself to get used to it, especially after she realized that when she was busy sensing what was in the water, the din of the calling dying stopped. She trained herself to use her gift, forcing herself to stay submerged and learning to recognize what was around her, until she began to love being immersed in the water. Sometimes she laughed at oblivious tourists, splashing just feet away from disdainful sharks. If only they knew what she knew, could feel what she felt! That could clear out the tourists for the summer, clear out the pushpull of their judgmental eyes as they lifted her jewelry dismissively then dropped it back down. Few people would ever swim in the ocean if they knew how close to predators they so often were.

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About the Author

Kathleen Furin is the author of the short story collection The Loneliness of Glass. Her work has been published in American Literary Review, Coolest American Stories, So to Speak, Permafrost, Evanescent, Philadelphia Stories, Literary Mama, Mutha Magazine, and Midwifery Today, among others. Kathleen's story "Body Memory" won first place in the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award competition. She holds an MSW from Temple University and an MFA in Fiction from New York University. Kathleen is a founding book coach with Author Accelerator and certified in the Amherst Writers and Artists method. She edits, consults, teaches, and writes, mostly in Philly.