Lost Girls: Short Stories
1st Place, Pencraft Awards, Fiction - Short Stories/Anthologies
Finalist, Clara Johnson Award for literature with a purpose
Finalist, Independent Author Network Award, Short Stories
2021 Reader's Favorite Silver Medal Winner in Literary Fiction
Finalist, 2020 Best Book Awards, Fiction: Short Story
Notable 100, Shelf Unbound
"Morris has an ability to wring a lot of emotion out of a few scant details, giving the feeling of a much longer work. Many share settings and characters, which contributes to a sense of interconnectivity and added meaning... she demonstrates a shrewd understanding of what makes her characters tick. In the end, readers will leave the collection feeling as though they’ve lived pieces of several real lives. A varied set of tales from a skilled practitioner of the short form."
-- Kirkus Reviews
"There is something about reading the short stories in the collection Lost Girls by Ellen Birkett Morris that makes me think of a magic trick. Blink and you won’t be able to figure out how she does it. But then, don’t blink. Stare as hard as you can. Retrace favorite paragraphs and lines and still be mystified about her pointillistic ability to create the images and lines that take the breath out of your body and create the unforgettable lost girls — and women — who inhabit these spaces rarely immortalized as engagingly or sympathetically in contemporary literature."
--Yvette Benavides, Book Public, Texas Public Radio
"The female characters in Lost Girls both startle and uplift us, but most importantly they demand to be seen. Set in and around the fictional southern mining town of Slocum, each of the seventeen stories in this collection features complex women and girls in pivotal moments of loss, self-discovery, and rebellion. With the same ease found in her Bevel Summers Award-winning short story, “May Apples,” Morris weaves in difficult topics effortlessly. In this collection, she does the important work of showing women as complicated, resourceful, erotic, unlikable, and bold in the face of societal pressures and outright violence against them."
--Southern Review of Books