In her debut story collection, Small Hot Rooms, Liz Solms intimately explores rooms within as well as rooms without. Here, swimming pools, dusty vehicles, women with children, women without, island life, city life, life on vacation, and life at work all create moments for close examination and discovery. Each story briefly illuminates the situations and feelings we might otherwise dismiss without examining their beauty or meaning. From Philadelphia to Jamaica, New Orleans, to Amsterdam, each story operates almost like a poem, pinning down—just for a moment—a sense of great shifting rootlessness.

Author: Liz Solms
Paperback: 118 pages, 2026
Literature | Short Fiction
ISBN-13: 9781972482032

“In a Liz Solms story, place is paramount. Heat is a character; menacing, embracing, searing and all encompassing. Water, too, has the power of a person, something that entrances, destroys, and bears life. These elegant tales defy orderly endings and opt for open-ended mystery and new wonder. Wrought in precise and wholly original language, this is a transcendent debut; a voice to make note of and celebrate.” —Thea Goodman, author of The Sunshine When She’s Gone and The Invented Mother

“Solms’s mastery of language, again and again, will carry you away.” —Benjamin Anastas, author of Too Good to Be True

“Solms writes with deceptive simplicity of the interplay between place and psyche with a striking keenness, taking us in and out of the rooms that characters form and are formed by… in a manner that is at once quiet and breathtaking.” —Meghan Gilliss, Author of Lungfish