Winner of the 2022 Moon City Short Fiction Award
Reveal Codes is a collection of short stories mapping the ways in which people, and other animals, read and misread, communicate and miscommunicate, mask and unmask, with and around one another. In the abandonware word processing program, WordPerfect, “reveal codes” is the command that reveals the coding behind the face of a document. The stories in this collection spiral around a (bio)semiology of the multiplicities of desire. In a series of pas de deux, or duets, the characters in these stories try to make themselves legible to family, friends, and lovers—revealing their messy patterns, their bare-faced vulnerabilities. These are stories that unfurl tentacles of longing made with language in an attempt to decode the illegibility of an incoherent and inchoate surrounding world.
Lee Ann Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, mostly recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which was named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library, selected as a poetry Finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, and named one of the “50 Must-Read Poetry Collections in 2019” by Book Riot. Their chapbook, #stringofbeads, a winner in the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, was released in early 2023. Winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, she has published fiction in Story Magazine, Cream City Review, North American Review, Hotel Amerika, The Offing, and Moon City Review, among other journals. Roripaugh is a Professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where they serve as Director of Creative Writing and Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review.
“These exquisitely written, intelligently compressed stories are filled with characters on precipices, navigating borders of disillusionment and despair. I was transfixed by them all. This book is pure heart.”
—Peter Kispert, author of I Know You Know Who I Am: Stories
“In this collection of beautifully crafted stories, acclaimed poet Lee Ann Roripaugh captures the fractures and silences in ordinary relationships. Her characters quietly fight to hold onto their footing in relationships fraught with tension. A young girl struggles with her controlling parents; another story echoes this fight when an adult daughter tries to understand her controlling and mentally incompetent mother. After listening to her Beloved promise to leave his wife over the course of several stories, a woman finally charts her own course. Roripaugh’s deadpan, incisive observations and her surprising turns of phrase make these stories shimmer. They will linger for a long time.”
—Geeta Kothari, author of I Brake for Moose and Other Stories
“In luminous prose, Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Reveal Codes dissects relationships and contemplates what people owe one another. Roripaugh examines the loneliness of contemporary life, the desire to be seen and understood by lovers and family, and the ease with which expectations and hopes can be crushed. Reveal Codes allows readers a glimpse into the secret interior worlds of its protagonists and shows the complex calculus required to not just get along but to survive relationships. These stories are filled with exquisite imagery that reveals moments of surprising beauty against a backdrop of loss and sadness. This book is sharp and insightful and smart, a truly masterful collection of short fiction.”
—Karin Lin-Greenberg, author of You Are Here
“The stories in Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Reveal Codes are filled with disappointed parents and disconnected lovers, revealed with a poet’s precision for the language of heartbreak and longing. Yet through all the disappointments in these seventeen stories, our characters—through wicked humor and sharp observation—discover hope, redemption, and even acceptance in the simple, urgent gestures that makes their lives complete. Each story closes with a scene that will expand the reader’s heart, lingering long after the moment ends. This is a wondrous collection of stories from a writer who animates ordinary lives with extraordinary force and grace.”
—Michael Nye, author of Until We Have Faces
Distributed for Moon City Press
