A story collection, in the vein of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, spanning worlds and dimensions, using strange and speculative elements to tackle issues ranging from class differences to immigration to first generation experiences to xenophobia.

What does it mean to be other? What does it mean to love in a world determined to keep us apart?

These questions murmur in the heart of each of Brenda Peynado’s strange and singular stories. Threaded with magic, transcending time and place, these stories explore what it means to cross borders and break down walls, personally and politically. In one story, suburban families perform oblations to cattle-like angels who live on their roofs, believing that their “thought and prayers” will protect them from the world’s violence. In another, inhabitants of an unnamed dictatorship slowly lose their own agency as pieces of their bodies go missing and, with them, the essential rights that those appendages serve. “The Great Escape” tells of an old woman who hides away in her apartment, reliving the past amongst beautiful objects she’s horded, refusing all visitors, until she disappears completely. In the title story, children begin to levitate, flying away from their parents and their home country, leading them to eat rocks in order to stay grounded.

With elements of science fiction and fantasy, fabulism and magical realism, Brenda Peynado uses her stories to reflect our flawed world, and the incredible, terrifying and marvelous nature of humanity.

NPR.org: “…stirs the soul with justice and rage…The author wields a righteous voice that’s as frank as it is dreamlike.”

The New York Times: “In these 16 engaging and imaginative stories, Peynado keeps our societal ills squarely in her sights.”

Kirkus Reviews starred review: “Superbly crafted…A sparkling, strange, and enthralling debut from a vivid new voice in contemporary fiction.”

Publisher’s Weekly starred review: “Peynado probes the limits of reckoning with such dilemmas as otherness, loss, and love in her glorious debut, a collection of inventive and fabulist stories…These alluring stories make powerful use of their fantastical motifs, enhancing the realities of the characters’ lives. The author’s skillful storytelling soars.”

Boston Globe: “Genre-bending brilliance…Peynado’s harnessing of the diasporic imagination establishes her as a true magician of the marvelous real.”

The National Book Review: “These wide-ranging, shape-shifting stories meld forms – fabulism, science fiction, surrealism, satire – but they are bound together by Peynado’s remarkable and original insights, her ingenuity, and her talent for not only seeing class distinctions and xenophobia but imagining them emerging on the horizon.”

Locus Magazine: “[Her] voice is just as distinctive when writing about real-world poverty and student debt or about grim futures in which people take refuge in VR while their bodies vegetate in clean rooms to protect from ravaging plagues on the outside.”

Tor.com: “…knocks you out with a brilliant right hook to the jaw.”

Washington Post: “A genre-bending sociopolitical commentary with prose that shines.”

San Fransisco Chronicle: “These stories sparkle with craft from first sentence to last line, careening through genres with prose that’s unexpected and satisfying…. Each of Peynado’s stories is finely formed as a diamond, grounded in unpredictable yet telling details.… Wily but throbbing with heart, they dart into unexpected crevices of human experience you may not have known you wanted to see.

The National Book Review: “These wide-ranging, shape-shifting stories meld forms – fabulism, science fiction, surrealism, satire – but they are bound together by Peynado’s remarkable and original insights, her ingenuity, and her talent for not only seeing class distinctions and xenophobia but imagining them emerging on the horizon.”

Locus Magazine: “[Her] voice is just as distinctive when writing about real-world poverty and student debt or about grim futures in which people take refuge in VR while their bodies vegetate in clean rooms to protect from ravaging plagues on the outside.”