Review: "Other Women: And Other Stories" by Nicola Maye Goldberg

Other Women: And Other Stories by Nicola Maye Goldberg
Published April 2026 via Verso Fiction
★★★★

A novella and three short stories. In the titular "Other Women", the novella of the bunch, a young woman struggling with the end of an affair abandons college and moves to Berlin as a nanny. In "Paris, 1979", a woman stakes out an apartment in Paris, watching as a former actress does...well, not much, most of the time. In "All Girls", a group of middle school girls grapples with the disappearance of one of their classmates. And in "The Virgin", a college student grapples with a crush and an assault.

"Other Women" was previously published as a standalone novella, and I don't think the cover design does quite right by this new version (why does the cover say "a novel" rather than "and other stories"?). But the image is striking and the stories within tightly woven.

"Other Women" is the titular story for a reason. The narrator is young and perhaps depressed and making decisions that are sometimes objectively bad and sometimes just impulsive; she finds herself sleeping with the wrong people and seeking out attention for not the healthiest reasons and making decisions because the option is there and not necessarily because she's thought the decision through.

You asked me why I dropped out of school. I told you: "I thought I wanted to be a poet, but I really just wanted to be a poem." (loc. 92*)

"Other Women" is told in the second person, addressing the man the narrator is infatuated with; a man who is sleeping with her but in a relationship with another woman. This isn't a story about drastic steps: the narrator knows that it is, if not a lost cause, not meant to be. And yet.

I think that if you'd wanted me less, you might have loved me more. (loc. 344)

This is the strongest of the pieces in the book, I think, and well worth the prime positioning as the book's title. A high 4 stars.

"Paris, 1979" sets us in the perspective of a woman staking out the apartment of a former actress. Our narrator has a male counterpart, but he is incidental. My knowledge of 1970s history does not tell me how likely this particular scenario is (the short version is that they are government agents, and the government doesn't trust the actress), but if the actress has secrets, she is hiding them well; very little happens until the story reaches its climax. That is not criticism—I prefer a slow build to something action-packed—but I also found this story to be the least memorable, and it was my least favorite of the bunch. 3 stars.

"All Girls" made up for "Paris, 1979" in spades. Here we're in the first-person plural, no one voice rising above the rest: These are, after all, 11-year-old girls, learning to exist as pack animals, filtering whatever they know or think they know through each other. One of their lot has gone missing, she's not somebody that our collective narrators know particularly well, and they find themselves trying to figure out how to navigate this sort of loss of a sense of security when they aren't even sure how to feel about the girl herself. I never experienced such an event (though I'm sure many of my classmates were going through difficult things that I knew nothing about), but there's a tangible sense that these girls are on the cusp of something, that this moment is pivotal in ways that they will only later understand. 4 stars.

"The Virgin" is the last story in the book and one that should probably come with a trigger warning. In it, a girl sees her first year of college as something wide open with possibility—until she is assaulted, and she has to both figure out how to frame that assault for herself (and what to do with it) and deal with other people's reactions and opinions. This is technically well done (in particular, excellent balance of showing and telling), though it felt to me like a story that has been told many times before...although, to be fair, partly because it is a story that so many young women have experienced. 3.5 stars.

Overall, a tightly wrought but not terribly happy collection. I'd recommend a break between pieces to let them sink in before moving on to the next one—but if you can take some darkness in your litfic, this is one for you.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.