Woman of the Hour
Woman of the Hour: Fifty Tales of Longing and Rebellion
…
A girl changes into a fox in self-defense. An idealist imagines what her new leader should look like, using her pets as reference. Guerrilla gardeners at dawn are sowing life-saving hope. A traveler delights in tasting European chefs. And a cruel ritual for teenage women turns into a revolution.
The fifty stories in this collection transport the reader from an Amsterdam canal to the Oaxacan coast, from a silt-streaked Venice to an imaginary world, from an Icelandic waterfall to a hall of mirrors.
Women play roles to find themselves, resist oblivion, break laws, swallow regrets, take revenge, follow their passions, and eat spiders. They’re everyday women climbing over obstacles and forging life to meet their needs. They dream of connection and find it in peculiar ways. They’re resilient. They’re brilliant. They’re… you.
Vine Leaves Press // July 2025 // ISBN: 978-3-98832-163-3
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Author
Claire Polders is a Dutch author of fiction and nonfiction. She published 5 novels and 100+ essays, stories, and book reviews.
Her flash fiction collection Woman of the Hour: Fifty Tales of Longing and Rebellion is her debut story collection.
Early Praise for Woman of the Hour
“The riveting characters in Woman of the Hour are full of desire, anger, regret, and darkness. Their fragmented lives are tough, but their grit inspires. This brilliant collection makes you love people again.”
—Grant Faulkner, author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story and executive producer on America’s Next Great Author
“This collection makes its mark, intellectually and emotionally, with prose that’s alive and electric and exquisitely distilled. Polders uses time—wields it actually—as a narrative drumbeat, marching her characters over the jagged terrain and uncertain landscapes of sex and seduction and coming of age. Told from individual and collective points of view, the stories portray not just the pain and rage and sorrows of living as a woman in a patriarchal society, but also those moments of transcendence, transformation, and self-becoming.
Woman of the Hour is a brilliant and necessary collection for our times.”
—Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works
“I simply devoured each stunning piece. Part travelogue—journeying through history, place, and the complexities of the female experience, revealing sensual exploration, seduction, exploitation. Part poetry—blending food, nature, and metamorphoses both animal and human. Claire Polders’ flash collection is an exquisite celebration of the whole, the real self, and a call to action for the girl, the woman, and the crone. With quiet intensity and intellectual depth, each flash unveils vivid portraiture of what it means to be a fully alive, thinking, and yearning being.”
—Jolene McIlwain, author of NPR-Book-of-the-Year Sidle Creek.
“In Woman of the Hour: Fifty Tales of Longing and Rebellion, Claire Polders illuminates the universal in the particular, capturing the essence of how it is to be female in prose that is exquisite in its precision, at once tough and lyric. Her protagonists walk the tightrope of life, navigating the delicate balance between tensions—independence and connection, societal expectations and a sense of self, responsibility and desire—in an ongoing and eternal search for meaning versus mere existence. Ultimately, there are questions, but no definitive answers: “To live, she has learned, is to wonder,” says the Woman of the Year. Each story in this collection is like a Godiva chocolate, dense and delicious: Dig in.”
—Sarah Freligh, author of Other Emergencies.
“In this brilliant, lyrical collection of flash, Claire Polders shines a kaleidoscopic light on the mystery of being human in a female body. Like figures in a stained-glass window, the many selves she explores assemble into a whole self—contradictory, passionate, and so protean they find it “a delight to live in a world where you can witness the dawn multiple times.” Polders’ vision, universal and probing, invites the reader to ask the eternal question “Who Am I?” and guarantees you will not be disappointed.”
—Thaisa Frank, author of Heidegger’s Glasses and Enchantment.
If you liked the book, please leave a review on GoodReads, Amazon, BookBub, or elsewhere where readers gather.
I’m available for podcasts, interviews, workshops, bookclub appearances, guest posts, and more.
Would you like to review this collection? Please contact me at cp(at)clairepolders(dot)com.
Reviews for Woman of the Hour
“In her flash fiction “Bleeding Girls Initiation Ritual,” Claire Polders shows us the resilience of the collective in a deft exploration of patriarchal structures and symbols. […] Her collection does not comprise polite, well-behaved stories, no. They are fierce, bruised, and unflinchingly alive.”
—Marcus Tan for SmokeLong Quarterly // Read the whole review
“Woman of the Hour was an absolute pleasure to read. It scared me because of how true. It energized me because of how true. And best of all, it forced me to take long, deep, cleansing breaths because of how true.”
—Elaina Battista-Parsons, author of Chomp Press Pull // Read the whole review
“This is a raw, honest, but somehow also hygge glimpse of what’s going on inside us, in case anyone has been wondering, looking at our gender quizzically. It’s all here, brilliantly condensed.”
—Kathleen Collins, author of From Rabbit Ears to the Rabbit Hole // Read the whole review