One part absurd humor, one part social commentary, Big, Weird, Lonely Hearts throws the most unlikely couples into bed together. This hilarious book includes a man mistaken for a bush, a mermaid refugee, a bird who dreams of weaponizing cats, a boy with a computer for a face, and a woman in love with a severed arm. These and more are the weird and lonely characters who drag their broken hearts through this collection, diligently searching for someone to stitch them up.Allen C. Jones' debut collection reads like a meeting between Peter Carey, Nikolai Gogol, and Lydia Millet where the task at hand is to write a love story. While the surface of these stories seems humorous and even absurd, beneath it runs a desperate nostalgia carried by a set of characters who will do anything to force their way back into love.'Big, Weird, Lonely Hearts is a weirdly exquisite collection of short stories, a riotously unpredictable but entertaining examination of absurd human life, and the...

A mixture of apocalypse, high-seas adventure, and otherworldliness, Her Death Was Also Water tells the story of seven people trying to survive on a small boat in a world completely transformed by an apocalyptic flood. Haunted by entwined pasts, the characters must voyage from a small Midwestern town through a world that seems increasingly fantastic. Each will face their past, and some will die, and the boat will even float through the miraculous, but only fifteen-year-old Charlotte will discover that death is not always death. Sometimes, it is also water.Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness meets Yann Martel's magical realism as a young woman discovers a sense of adventurous possibility in a world that has taken nearly everything from her.'Her Death Was Also Water reaches back to the imagery of the great classics, and projects the notion of a water world into the punishing, perilous future of a post-climate change planet.' — Stuart Dybek'[A] searing yet...