Why You'll Love This
Forty-one stories spanning three decades prove that Lewis Shiner has been one of America's most quietly essential writers all along.
- Great if you want: short fiction that blends rock music, politics, and quiet grief
- The experience: reflective and unpredictable — each story lands differently, cumulatively powerful
- The writing: Shiner's prose is spare and unshowy, but emotionally precise
- Skip if: you want consistent genre thrills — this collection resists easy categorization
About This Book
Lewis Shiner has spent decades writing fiction that refuses to stay in one place — stories that move between rock and roll and revolution, between domestic heartbreak and speculative strangeness, between the intimate and the mythic. This collection gathers forty-one of them into a single volume, and what emerges is a portrait of a writer genuinely interested in how people break, rebuild, and sometimes simply endure. The emotional stakes here are real: love going wrong, history reasserting itself, ordinary lives pressed against extraordinary circumstances. These aren't comfortable stories, but they're honest ones.
What sets this volume apart as a reading experience is the combination of range and consistency — Shiner's prose stays clean and controlled whether he's writing noir, science fiction, or something that defies easy categorization. The extensive author's notes accompanying the stories add unusual depth, offering a rare window into how the work was made and what it cost. Readers who enjoy understanding a writer's process alongside the fiction itself will find those notes as engaging as the stories they accompany. Taken together, it's a substantial and rewarding body of work.