Angel Lust

In LA Times First Fiction Award winner Maggie Shipstead's "Angel Lust," Simon Orff, a thrice-married movie producer, departs for his deceased father's house, daughters selfishly in tow. "If he had to referee their squabbles and navigate their quicksilver emotions while sifting through his father's possessions, he hoped the house would not seem so empty, or he hoped at least the emptiness would be neutral."

Instead, the emptiness proves quite virile. His father's possessions are souvenirs of his romance with Simon's mother (who died suddenly of a brain aneurism at forty-eight), further evidence of desire having its own half-life, independent of bodies and their relationships.

But for Simon, a man who "had always perceived a chaos in women about to break loose," lust for his first wife has out-lived their marriage, while lust for his current wife is lifeless—bored, as he characterizes it, with her eagerness, her nubility.

About the author: Maggie Shipstead grew up in Orange County, CA. Maggie is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. She won the 2012 Dylan Thomas Prize and the 2012 LA Times First Fiction Award for Seating Arrangements. Her short fiction has appeared in The Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best American Short Stories.

About Recommended Reading: Great authors inspire us. But what about the stories that inspire them? Recommended Reading, the latest project from Electric Literature, publishes one story every week, each chosen by a great author or editor. In this age of distraction, we uncover writing that's worth slowing down and spending some time with. And in doing so, we help give great writers, literary magazines, and independent presses the recognition (and readership) they deserve.