The Kindness of Terrible People and Other Stories is The Inner Loop’s Author’s Corner spotlight. The Inner Loop cultivates and promotes the distinctive literary culture of Washington, DC. Author’s Corner supports local authors’ independently published books by spotlighting them in community programming and collaborations.
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Stephanie Dupal is a Franco-Canadian and American professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College. She and her husband live in the D.C. metro area. Her stories appear in various magazines here and abroad. The Kindness of Terrible People is her first collection.
Emily Mitchell is the author of three published works of fiction, most recently the story collection The Church of Divine Electricity, winner of the 2023 Elixir Press Fiction Award and published in November 2025 by University of Wisconsin Press. Her short stories have appeared in Harpers’, Ploughshares, The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the New Statesman and Guernica. She serves as fiction editor of New England Review and teaches at University of Maryland. Her second novel, Far Ocean, about 18th century botanist and explorer Jeanne Baret, won the 2025 Big Moose Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press.
About The Kindness of Terrible People and Other Stories
Stephanie Dupal’s debut collection of fifteen stories evokes in startling, lyrical prose the cruelties, misguided kindnesses, and surprises that accompany ageing and mortality in the lives of girls and women. Demonstrating a remarkable range of intimate dilemmas set in varied landscapes, these stories affirm the validity of characters’ choices and the courage–and rage–of their convictions.
In “To Lie Engulfed in the Waves of the Sea,” a renowned cellist lies to be hired at a performing arts school; in “The Ethics of Keeping Company with Strangers,” a strong-willed teenager and her father are stranded in a Utah desert; in “A Baby of the Ganges,” a grieving couple attempts to reconcile on a trip to Kolkata; in “Godfrey Green,” an art restorer, painting in the shadow of her elusive mentor, abandons her ambitions; and, in the emblematic final story “Boys and Girls Swimming Like Dolphins,” a Marine veteran and her husband fixate on the gender of their future child as they consider fertility treatments.
Among other characters inhabiting these pages are an inebriated mother who fears detachment from her son; a retired professor who lures her niece’s boyfriend into devastating, flirtatious conversation in the title story; a lonely widow who hunts an imposing raccoon; and a girl with a rare condition who becomes an unlikely heroine in Napoleonic France.
Richly imagined, The Kindness of Terrible People and Other Stories heralds a bold new voice in North American letters.
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