The Missing Kidney and other stories

AN OPRAH DAILY BEST SUMMER READS OF 2025 PICK

“Fans of Lorrie Moore can quench their thirst for witty short stories and self-aware, smart-ass narrators.”—Kirkus Reviews

“This collection of 14 stories, brimming with scrappy characters navigating life in New York in the 70s and 80s, is both a kaleidoscopic period piece and a timeless exploration of the complexities of human relationships.“—The New York Times Book Review

“The best short story writer you’ve never heard of.“—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Praise for Queen for a Day

“An engrossing and compassionate collection showing motherhood in its most unrelenting form.” – Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Maxine Rosaler’s stories are both hard-edged and comic, both laced with despair and hopeful against all expectation. New York City is the setting, a struggle to prosper in the face of bad choices and deeply ingrained perversity is the theme. Constant, however, is a narrative voice that proves irresistible, and a craftsman’s approach to the construction of these contemporary parables.”—C. Michael Curtis, Fiction Editor, The Atlantic

“Rosaler writes of Mimi’s ongoing struggle from firsthand experience and instills in her protagonist such fierce resolve to do all she can for her son while simultaneously limning awkward episodes with ironic humor; the reader becomes immersed in all that the diagnosis of autism in one’s child must entail.”—Booklist

Maxine Rosaler’s novel Queen for a Day was nominated for The Kirkus Prize. The Jewish Book Council chose it to be one of ten fiction books included in its 2021 list of recommended books. She is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. Stories of hers have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Tikkun, The Southern Review, Glimmer Train, Witness, Fifth Wednesday, storySouth, Green Mountains Review, and other literary magazines and cited in editions of Best American Short Stories and Best American Nonfiction. One was a finalist for the Nelson Algren Awards.