The Doppelgängers: Excerpted from SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: Stories (Electric Literature's Recommended Reading)

"In this story, 'The Doppelgängers,' Phillips shows the blistering world of new motherhood to be personal and intimate and inherently terrifying. It is also, and equally, a strange collective act, lived alongside other new mothers who exist in the same shadowy, eerie world, who are undergoing the same torments and feeling both anchored by and separate from the body. Phillips knows that a parent makes us always Other. I read Helen Phillips because she is wise and she is funny. She is a writer on whom nothing is lost. Best of all, she is a quiet subversive. In Helen Phillips’s world, everything appears as vast and rich as it truly is. Enjoy the story." - Lauren Groff Author of Fates and Furies

About the Author: Helen Phillips is the author of four books, including the novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Award) and the collection And Yet They Were Happy (named a notable book by The Story Prize). She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the Italo Calvino Prize. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times and Tin House, and on Selected Shorts. An assistant professor at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children. Her new collection of short stories, Some Possible Solutions, is forthcoming from Henry Holt in May 2016.

About the Guest Editor: Lauren Groff is the New York Times-bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the celebrated short-story collection Delicate Edible Birds. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and several Best American Short Stories anthologies; has won the Paul Bowles Prize for Fiction, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize; and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Orange Award for New Writers, and the L.A. Times Book Prize.

About the Publisher: Electric Literature is an independent publisher amplifying the power of storytelling through digital innovation. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, invites established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommended great fiction. Once a month we feature our own recommendation of original, previously unpublished fiction. Stay connected with us through our eNewsletter, Facebook, and Twitter, and find previous Electric Literature picks in the Recommended Reading archives.