SHOT
2025 Living Now Book Awards Gold Winner in General Fiction
2025 International Impact Book Awards Winner in Contemporary Fiction
2025 Best Book Awards Finalist in Fiction: Short Stories
2025 Pencraft Runner-Up Winner in Short Stories / Anthologies
2025 Pencraft Runner-Up Winner in Short Stories / Anthologies
2025 Chanticleer Semi-Finalist for Collections and Anthologies
“A potent and emotionally stirring depiction of how violence shapes everyday life.”— Kirkus Reviews
“This book should be read by all people, regardless of which side of the gun lobby they may fall.” —Readers’ Favorite, 5 stars
“Shot is easily a top five best read, ever. This book will have profound and reverberating effects on all who read it.” —Jill Rey, For the Love of the Page
“One of the most structurally audacious and emotionally devastating short story collections to emerge in contemporary American literature.” —The Bookish Elf
“Shot: A Dictionary of the Lost is excellent, well-constructed, thought-provoking, and powerfully structured. . . . compelling, sad, and appealing all in one.”—Midwest Book Review
Anna argues with her mom about a school science award. Ben discovers in his seventh decade that he is Jewish. Chester searches for his little sister in a snowstorm. Dixie is pregnant with her second child.
Their stories and twenty-two others read like the ABC’s of everyday life. One way or another, the challenges that bring drama to our lives work themselves out, right? Or maybe not. Sometimes the ending isn’t at all what you expect.
Shot is a collection of short stories about gun violence, organized as a dictionary, with a story for each letter of the alphabet. Each life is precious. And life itself is to be celebrated.
Find your copy wherever books are sold, including:
:
LEARN MORE…
Discuss Shot with your book club. View a map of the story locations,
and resources for gun violence prevention.
Praise for Shot
“Haunting and powerful, Shot reveals the devastating reality of gun violence in America. These deeply human stories confront us with the urgent truth: unless we act, gun violence will eventually reach us all. Both a call to awareness and a poignant reminder of the work that still needs to be done.”
Sandy Phillips
Founder of Survivors Empowered
“In a poignant collection of 26 fictional stories, each victim of a mass shooting shares their final thoughts, dreams, and fears in the moments before tragedy strikes. Through vivid, heartbreaking snapshots, Jude Berman gracefully explores the human cost of gun violence, amplifying voices lost to an epidemic of shootings.”
Heidi Yewman
Author of Dumb Girl and Beyond the Bullet: Personal Stories of Gun Violence Aftermath
“In Shot, Jude Berman brings forth a powerful and haunting exploration of gun violence in America in a bold work of short stories that will captivate readers with its thematic unity and vivid prose, leaving readers to ponder what lies beyond the final moments.”
Jennifer Goldsmith
Journalist and survivor of two mass shootings
“With her eye for detail and talent for deftly and empathetically sketching characters, Jude Berman has pulled off a true, and important, feat. In her indelible characters, you will surely see someone you know. You may even see yourself. If art can move the needle, this book might do it.”
Lorna Graham
Writer at Dateline NBC and author of Where You Once Belonged
“Jude Berman presents well-crafted stories of individuals of various ages, occupations, and locations whose lives are abruptly impacted by gun violence. Shot captivates the reader with the details of each life and leaves us wishing the outcome had been different and knowing, in a different political climate, it could be.”
Marilyn J. Zimmerman
Author of In Defense of Good Women
“Shot delivers a poignant message about the US gun problem. Using fictional characters, Jude Berman does a brilliant job at putting faces and voices to the victims of gun violence. Anyone who cares about humanity and the thousands of firearm deaths annually will want to read this book.”
Julia Hatch
Author of The Very Best of Care
“.”
Kristina Amelong
Author of What My Brother Knew