Best of What's Next: Author Holly Goddard Jones

HOMETOWN: Russellville, Ky.
BOOK: Girl Trouble
FOR FANS OF: Harper Lee, Heidi Julavits, Claire Messud

In Holly Goddard Jones’ short-story collection Girl Trouble, marriages crumble, probable murderers walk free and people toy with and discard each other’s feelings like trinkets from a cereal box. In artful but unpretentious prose, the 30-year-old author explores the simultaneous depths and limitations of being human, showing the many sides of what usually appear to be black-and-white issues.

WHAT’S NEXT: Jones is working on a novel about a death in the same small Kentucky town featured in the vignettes of Girl Trouble. “I think after I finish with this project, I’ll have exhausted that set of concerns, at least temporarily,” she says. “I’d like to think I’ll shift into something completely different, write about places other than Kentucky, which has been kind of my literary universe for the last five or six years, and play with different tones.”