Esquire Ball, Stories from the Great Black Swamp

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ISBN: 9781625571809

Catalog: Black Lawrence Press

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Categories E-Books, Fiction, Short Stories

Esquire Ball, Stories from the Great Black Swamp

Name: Esquire Ball, Stories from the Great Black Swamp
SKU: 9781625571809
Availability: InStock

Lisa Slage Robinson

Publication Date: February 10, 2026

Description

“In these 13 tales, murky mythologies mix with the letter of the law in an America maturing its ‘greed is good’ ethos such that an ambitious young woman must face the true cost of every billable hour…together, they create a bold mosaic. A collection as enigmatic as it is precise.”

—Kirkus

Esquire Ball is a debut collection of thirteen linked short stories orbiting a fictional law firm and a young female attorney navigating ambition and power in a traditionally white male sphere. Set in 1980s Northwest Ohio—a region once known as the Great Black Swamp—the stories explore the buried violence of drained land and lives altered by ambition, loss, and transformation. In this surreal terrain, men marry frog wives; souls are trapped in farmhouse windows; a woman shares cosmic truths through an improbable threesome; a lawyer stalks her client for a keepsake; and a law student glimpses the future in a museum of medieval torture. Blending fairytale, myth, and a Midwestern Gothic sensibility, Esquire Ball nods to Borges, Kafka, and du Maurier, delivering a drifting, grotesque mosaic of stories slightly askew.

Praise

These linked stories draw readers into the rugged, mythic landscape of Northwest Ohio, into lives defined by crime and consequence. Lisa Slage Robinson writes the human condition with terrific sensitivity and surprise. Esquire Ball is a marvel.

– Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise

Toledo, Ohio takes on a dark, mythic quality in this fantastic debut collection by Lisa Slage Robinson. She pries open, sludges through, dresses up and dresses down the complex lives of her characters living in what was once the Great Black Swamp. I can’t say enough good things about this fabulous fabulist collection. Here is a writer moonwalking through the shoulder-padded minefield of the 1980s with wit and grace.

–Sherrie Flick, author of I Have Not Considered Consequences

Lisa Slage Robinson’s Esquire Ball is rooted vividly and brilliantly in a particular place but veined through with human universals: avarice and exultation, meanness and passion, lust and love and rage. There’s a realism in these stories that has both breadth and depth, and there are slides into the strange that happen suddenly yet entirely logically; in every register this collection thrums with life. I loved it with my whole heart and my whole mind.

-Clare Beams, author of The Garden

Who wouldn’t keep reading a story that began “Trevor needed a wife?” Lisa Slage Robinson has a great gift for making readers care about her characters; we want what they want; we dread what they dread. And she is an expert in bad behaviour. Many of her women are not as nice as they seem. Esquire Ball, Stories from the Great Swamp is a dazzling and irresistible collection.

-Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven

In Esquire Ball: Stories from the Great Black Swamp, Lisa Slage Robinson spins a set of stories that are not just linked but entangled: a sister blessed and saddled with a darling brother dumped on her doorstep by her absentee father; a lawyer who finds himself trying to con his colleagues to aide an ailing widow and her unofficial granddaughter; a young man on the verge of professional success who takes to the swamps to replace the fiancée who abandoned him. Though many of the stories take place in courtrooms and law offices, these are characters who are at heart lawless, irrepressible, who resist the world’s efforts and even their own desperate desires to become respectable and instead lead the reader through twisted, intriguing paths.

-Anjali Sachdeva author of All the Names they Used for God

About the Author

Lisa Slage Robinson

Lisa Slage Robinson writes to explore invisible landscapes and magical feminism. She is the author of Esquire Ball, Stories from the Great Black Swamp (Black Lawrence Press, February 2026). Named a finalist for Midwest Review’s Great Midwest Fiction Contest, her work appears in or is forthcoming from Iron Horse Literary Review, Atticus Review, Smokelong Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, PRISM International, Storm Cellar, Lit Pub, Necessary Fiction, Meat for Tea, and elsewhere. Lisa serves as a board member for Autumn House Press. A graduate of Bowling Green State University and Case Western Reserve University School of Law, she holds an MFA from Chatham University. A former corporate attorney and litigator, Lisa practiced law in both the States and Canada. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and keeps the lights on for their daughters who live in LA and NYC but who still like to come home.

Visit Author Page

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--Kirkus
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