Review: George Choundas’s I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever
By Grace Cooper
George Choundas’s short story collection I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever, winner of the 2025 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, explores the uncanny ways we navigate loss, hardship, and change. Across twelve stories packed with molasses ships, fighting roosters, and persnickety aunts, Choundas explores the way we don’t necessarily have a complete fix on our identities. He’s a mesmerizing storyteller of our growing and shifting experiences.
Halfway through the collection we have the joy of reading “The Sisters Jeppard,” a story previously published by New Ohio Review. In that story, the narrator talks about their cousin’s first and second wives and develops that idea of unfixed identity. The first wife was loved very deeply by her mother and two aunts, otherwise described as “the three sisters.” The narrator seems almost judgmental of the care and attention the three sisters gave the first wife, describing her “upbringing” as “so different from how the hard world handles a person.” The first wife tragically passes away and, following her death, the narrator discusses the death of other loved ones that they’re seemingly much closer to, such as their cousin and the cousin’s second wife, who becomes her best friend. The family relationships are complicated, almost ornate, and Choundas wants us to get enmeshed in the strange way connection builds and grief lingers. After losing all these people, the narrator thinks back and reflects on the three sisters’ love with a new perspective:
How do you blame those sisters for giving their girl every love, for knowing that the world is unrelenting and
that the young need a commensurately maximum devotion? I’d do the same. Looking back, knowing what I
know, I’d do exactly the same. God bless them for doing as if they’d been certain when they could not have been.
Nothing about her dying was good, and her dying gave me the best friend I ever had. The three sisters, they are long gone, and their staunch love is our subject still. We know so little.
After the narrator experiences this loss, we come to understand how the narrator is no longer resentful of the sisters’ love but understands it differently. They weren’t close at all, but the way in which the first wife still deeply changed the narrator shows the genius of Choundas’s style; he approaches grief, and how we understand it, by showing us a constellation of relationships. We don’t necessarily need to be close to someone for them to change us, and that reverberation is one of Choundas’s consistent themes. He continues on:
Here is the percussion, these beats the world gives to show that these lives are not our own, that they are
contingent and slight. A rain of rocks, more or less, and bewilderment. Go ahead and look up, or look down, it
doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if we dodge smartly, cheer a little when the drops fall wide, give up, give thanks.
These few lines represent an important throughline in Choundas’s storytelling. When we experience the things that shape and change us, these things aren’t always within our personal control, and neither are they always what we expect them to be. Even if we “dodge smartly,” we won’t always escape, or have a fix on our identities. This reflection that love means everything but that life may just be “bewilderment” is the reason “The Sisters Jeppard” is one of my personal favorites from the collection; it gives us an odd peace of mind. It insists that we won’t fully understand why difficult things happen in life—like the death of these loved ones—but it also resists sentiment. We will grow and find meaning, but those paths won’t be typical.
Choundas continues explore grief and change with “The Son of Butt Trudd”—a silly title for a solid story. We follow the narrator and her experience getting bullied by a fellow classmate, Alison Derby. Eric Trudd is another student that Alison would bully, so the narrator finds herself relating to him. One day, though, Eric joins in on bullying the narrator, so we have a circle of bullying. Following this, the narrator finds a way to get back at Eric and Alison, embarrassing them when they develop a romantic relationship—but this particular action haunts her. Years later, she begins baking desserts for Eric’s son, Jerry. She describes her interactions with Jerry, such as the odd things he says or the ways in which he reminds the narrator of Eric. She reflects on this, describing how Jerry pushes her to grow:
Why do I, a grown woman with a husband and career and contentment, concern myself with a boy I have no
reason to know? Things–relationships included–exist for a reason. Now, the mind’s next move is to assume they
exist for reasons having to do with us. But life teaches that is not true. Not true at all. That is arrogance. Things
do not revolve around us.
And yet they do. Life teaches they do. Jerry is there to test me. He is there to goad me and to shrive me, to
remind me of my continuing inhumanity–which is to say, my humanity. I am a good person. But that also is
arrogance, and perhaps the supreme arrogance of life–thinking we have a fix on who we are, when all we can do
is hearten the best part of ourselves and hem in the lesser ones.”
The narrator obviously holds a grudge toward Alison, but, arguably, she holds even more resentment toward Eric, as his furthering of her pain was the ultimate act of betrayal. Despite this, the narrator leans into the idea of growing from this experience, with people such as Jerry reminding them of such. Are we meant to take this speaker’s guilt at face value or to see it as some overly self-conscious eccentricity? Either way, the story explores a complex moral situation, and it feels particularly important that Choundas uses Jerry to push the narrator towards this growth. Like in “The Sisters Jeppard,” distant relationships spur change. In Choundas’s stories that change is continuous—sometimes darkly humorous. More importantly, people such as Jerry in “The Son of Butt Trudd” and the first wife in “The Sisters Jeppard” illustrate this idea that who we are and grow to be is not always within our control—we are “contingent and slight.” Across this collection, this overarching theme leaves the reader to feel concerned about, but attached to, even grateful for, those seemingly random inputs that make us who we are.
The interconnected nature of this collection is another strength. Choundas makes it feel as though each story in I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever—from the opening salvo of
“Katingo . . . ” to the metafictional closer “Cock Chimbi”—is a note in a single musical phrase, their overarching themes so deeply harmonized. Collectively, I found that reading these stories sharpened a deeper curiosity for the individual experiences and relationships within our lives and how they all contribute to a bigger, stranger, picture.
George Choundas is a master of those odd and defining moments. Though we may know so little, we do know this: I Think I’ll Stay Here Forever is a short story collection to chew on and cherish.
Grace Cooper is a NOR intern and Communication Studies student at Ohio University.
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