<p><i>Vicious Children and Other Stories</i> contains four stories, each concerned in their own way with boyhood, friendship, masculinity, and alienation. <i>Vicious Children</i> is a novella that follows two brothers, Jesse and Danny, as they explore a time in which their roles in their community and family are changing. In “What Else Are We Going to Do With Them?” a group of young boys fight betta fish to the death, leaving one of the boys, Josh, questioning his enjoyment of the fight. “Gash” deals with the main character, Adam’s, memory of a traumatic event in contrast to the lighthearted way he and his family tell the story in the present. Finally “Don’t You Have a Name?” follows Zach, a content moderator for a social media platform, who finds that, although he excels at the job, it comes at the cost of his mental health.</p>

<p>    </p> <p>These short stories began as reimaginings – I wondered what would come if I took Islamic myths of churail, oracular trees, and jinn and considered them in the half-light of diaspora, where the monsters are familiar but newly cultured to a globalized world. The stories in <em>Distance, the Midnight</em>, both flash and long-form, are loosely linked by themes of alienation, physical displacement, and grief. They ask questions about questions, which in the world of the book are best left unanswered, and the possession of the spirit, which, normally feared as a loss of control of the body, is here depicted as a necessary escape to a different sort of embodiment. </p> <p><br></p> <p>In “Antipode,” Paro, a churail living in Houston, marks the ten year anniversary of her husband’s death and the loss of her connection to the divine with her first real exorcism in over a decade. In “No Blood in the Creek,” Mallika, who was once possessed looks for her jinn in a desperate attempt to be displaced from her body once more. In “Admiring Myself Sideways,” a woman grown accustomed to her split personality searches for a lost self in mirrors. In “Hard Work,” an unemployed person gives up on the job market and turns to a life of crime and communes. These stories and the rest point to a singular interrogative: what if giving up on the being we’re born into is a better alternative to accepting it. </p> <p><br></p> <p>I could not have written this manuscript without having read Leonora Carrington, Helen Oyeyemi, Sabrina Orah Mark, Clarice Lispector and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya alongside folktales from the global south. From these writers, I’ve learned that the surreal can lend a story more than diversion and quirk. It can be a vehicle for tenderness, can leave a reader raw, unsure at what point the text peeled away a scab. I hope this collection is a movement towards that tenderness. </p>

A short story collection containing nine stories and a 20,000-word novella. The stories are speculative fiction and they experiment with form.

<p>A collection of poems navigating and negotiating the powerful mythological forces in the speaker’s life, from Irish revolutionary history to “canonical” literary figures to American comic books. These poems ask the reader to consider how language, narrative, and art shape the world, and so how we come to know ourselves through the texts—no matter their form or shape—we encounter.</p>