Fiction. THE HYPOTHETICAL MAN is a darkly humorous collection of stories featuring an assortment of anonymous characters--A, B, and S--all with problems. They work undercover at an amusement park in Illinois or else they work at a secret government facility that would prefer not to be named. They attend a freewheeling sales meeting with death masks on the wall. Some raise pigs, others race goats. One lives in a suburban home where he watches his wife with another man. They are, together, misled, misunderstood, and mistaken often, but their pursuit of answers never ends.

The Hypothetical Man

Literature & Fiction

Maliszewski, Paul

Weil, Ryan

Short Stories & Anthologies

Trnsfr Books

Fiction. Together for the first time, the interlinked tales of Stephen Dixon's DEAR ABIGAIL AND LATE STORIES in a beautifully designed set. "Reveals Stephen Dixon as one of the two great American storytellers today. The other is George Saunders."--El PaÍs "Stephen Dixon is one of the great secret masters--too secret. I return again and again to his stories for writerly inspiration, moral support and comic relief... Please read him, you."--Jonathan Lethem "Stephen Dixon has somehow been overlooked as one of the masters of recording how a person thinks, of what it feels like to be alive inside a brain... He should be remembered as one of postmodern modernism's greats."--Blake Butler

Dear Abigail and Late Stories: Two Book Set

DIXON, STEPHEN

Fiction. Women's Studies. Winner of the Holland Prize for Fiction. Weaving together fabulist invention and gritty realism, Rebecca Fishow's debut collection, THE TROUBLE WITH LANGUAGE, unearths stories of men and women whose traumatic experiences make way for dazzlingly cerebral lives. A young man finds a severed head at his door years after his mother takes her own life. A married couple initiates a bloody jailbreak. A young woman poses nude for strangers in attempts to pay for mental health treatment, while another finds herself rapidly shrinking in a hotel room. No two of these surprising and playful fictions are alike, and each encourages us to peek behind life's curtains to discover more bizarre, enchanting, and joyful truths. Wondrously assured, THE TROUBLE WITH LANGUAGE heralds the arrival of a major talent.

The Trouble with Language

Fishow, Rebecca

"It's as if Richard Brautigan and Derek McCormack rewrote Collateral to make it a buddy film in which reality is constantly in the process of collapsing. This is the detective novel on acid."--Brian Evenson 
Detectives Michael and Daniel must try to solve a murder on planet Earth. The victim may or may not be named Jane from Yesterday. And the Man of One Thousand Years, cult leader of the Architects of Q'Noor, may or may not be responsible. As Michael and Daniel hurl themselves inexorably toward a final confrontation with the Man of One Thousand Years through a dreamlike landscape of exploding cacti, cultists, centaurs, spells, river gorgons, lobster enthusiasts, and undulating portals activated by prayer, they collide with a succession of randos and adversaries--Vampyre King, Man with Face Like Fire, Qyumoo'un, Eater of Dreams, Excalibur, Prince Al-Wajeed, and dozens more--sparing few in their frenzied quest for the truth.< 
"This book is a quest, a doorway, a surrealist play--I don't know what the hell to call it, which is why I can't recommend it enough. You've never read anything else that's fun like this is fun."--Amber Sparks 
Fiction. Poetry. African & African American Studies.\nBook Description\n"It's as if Richard Brautigan and Derek McCormack rewrote Collateral to make it a buddy film in which reality is constantly in the process of collapsing. This is the detective novel on acid."--Brian Evenson

Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds Don't Make a Sound

Hoy, Dan

Kleine, Mike

United States

Propulsive, keenly observed stories of young people at the intersection of excess and perseverance, kinship and identity. 
Ranging from Austin to New Orleans, Richmond to Philly, the interrelated stories of THE DESPERADO DAYS lay bare the gritty lives of workingclass hustlers existing at the intersection of multiple worlds and social castes. We find Levy, Fenton, Eldridge, and other young people searching for purpose and truth among workaday lives and the instabilities of selfindulgence, love, violence, and race, fortifying themselves even as they watch others around them flame out and fade. Utterly original and pulsing with life, THE DESPERADO DAYS is an examination of perseverance, amity, and grace at the edges of American late capitalism. 
"X.C. Atkins's brief, deft, intimate, painful, gracefilled, totally bullshitfree stories floored me. To read them is to live 100 years or more in under a minute."--Lucy Ives, author of Life Is Everywhere and Cosmogony 
"In these sharp tales of shift beers gone wrong, X.C. Atkins homes in on the moments where dynamics change between coworkers, lovers, and family members. Layer in a wealth of astute observations about racial identity and service industry camaraderie, and THE DESPERADO DAYS hits harder than a double shot of well whiskey."--Chris L. Terry, author of Black Card and Zero Fade 
"'It always seems like more can go wrong when there's loud music,' goes the last sentence of the opening paragraph of THE DESPERADO DAYS. Things always go wrong, but never predictably in these short stories. Stories with the direct, casual grit of Scott McClanahan and Sam Pink. Stories with the heart and colloquial humor of Bryan Washington, of Lucia Berlin. Stories about aging, workingclass millennials battling both the tug of unreached dreams and the grip of daily dread in a rarely sunny Philadelphia. Stories about boys still becoming men, men missing being boys. Noisy stories. Stories that register each in their own velocity, never hitting the same note twice."--Tyler Barton, author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum 
Fiction. Short Stories. African & African American Studies.

The Desperado Days

Atkins, X.C.

Literary

Songs in E―

Brady, Dan

Poetry

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