Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away

Did you ever wish, with every cell in your body, that you could run away? From home, from a person, from your job, from yourself? Physically or emotionally, on foot or purely in your own mind? In Already Gone, forty of today’s most exciting writers take flight in all these ways and more.

In an electrifying hybrid collection of fiction and memoir, authors such as Deesha Philyaw, Amber Sparks, and Lilly Dancyger finish what Thelma & Louise started. From a reimagined tale of Lot’s wife fleeing a burning city to a secret elopement to avoid an arranged marriage, from a mother who wins the lottery and abandons her family to a rich man’s obsessive search through space and time, from a drag queen who transforms into her fantasy to a teenager who walks the city streets at night in search of a way out, Already Gone is a collection of runaway stories that explores what it means to fly, to flee, to escape—to search for who we are. These stories and essays take us to dangerous places in order to free us from what holds us back.

The artistry on display within Already Gone is next level—these are not just stories, they’re offramps and exit routes for readers and writers looking to break free from the ho-hum mundanity of daily living. Here is an oasis. Grieco has curated a vibrant, pulsing mosaic of human experience.

Escapist lit at its best, the Already Gone anthology features forty stories infused with humanity and heart. Without pretense, the collection presents new definitions of what it means to be present, gone, and left behind. Grieco’s skillful and empathetic editing is evident in each of the selected works. Readers will find well-known names interspersed with new writers, stories of love and relationships, pain and loss, movement and stasis, community and individuality, with touches of humor. Through the integration of a range of stories, readers can feel and identify with the overarching theme. But there’s more here – a rawness, an emotionality that makes each story memorable on its own and together; a guidebook to running away from, and towards, life.

Jennifer Bort Yacovissi reflects on themes of autonomy and women’s rights in her review of Already Gone. Her praise for Deesha Philyaw, Emily James, Ruth Joffre, and more is in the Washington Independent Review of Books now.

“Rarely is there a story collection that speaks to both the writer and the child in me as Already Gone did,” Caroline Bock writes in the Washington Independent Review of Books. Read her interview with ASP co-founder Rose Solari here.

Diane Gottlieb discusses the art of editing an anthology and how Already Gone reframes the act of running away in this insightful interview with editor Hannah Grieco.

Editor Bio:

Hannah Grieco is a writer and editor based in Washington, DC. She edits novels and prose collections for Alan Squire Publishing and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the ASP Bulletin, the press’s online literary magazine. She edited the anthology And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative, from Alternating Current Press (January 2022). Her own writing has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction, and has been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50. Her work can be read in a variety of publications, including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, Poet Lore, Fairy Tale Review, and more. She teaches writing at American University and The Writer’s Center. Find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on Twitter/IG @writesloud.

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