WINNER OF THE 2022 MISSISSIPPI INSTITUTE OF ARTS AND LETTERS AWARD IN FICTION
“These ingenious stories are so funny and sparkling and slyly inventive that their pain catches you by surprise, like a sunburn after a day at the beach.”—Eric Puchner, author of Last Day on Earth
"A beautiful and fierce collection." --Alexander Weinstein, author of Universal Love
"These stories are ambitious and inventive. Each time, the most compelling element is not the strangeness of the intricately imagined future, but the ways in which the characters learn to interact with it." --Susan Perabo, author of Why They Run the Way They Do
In Becky Hagenston’s fourth collection, the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. The characters are sex-toy sellers, internet trolls, parents, students, and babysitters—all trying to make sense of a world where nothing is quite what it appears to be. A service robot makes increasingly disturbing requests. A middle school teacher is accused of witchcraft—and realizes the accusations might be true. Two college students devise a way to avoid getting hit on in bars. A baker finds bizarre anomalies in his sourdough. A librarian follows her dead ex-husband through the Atlanta airport. In these stories, men and women confront grief, danger, loneliness, and sometimes—the strangest discovery of all—unexpected joy. Hagenston delivers a collection that is, at its weird and shining heart, about people discovering what—for better or worse—they are capable of.
