In a spine-tingling new collection, the unique and wickedly funny Helen Phillips offers an idiosyncratic series of "what-ifs" about our fragile human condition
What if you knew the exact date of your death? What if your perfect hermaphrodite match existed on another planet? What if your city was filled with doppelgangers of you?
In these remarkably inventive stories Helen Phillips' characters search for solutions to the problem of survival in an irrational, infinitely strange world. We meet a wealthy woman who purchases a high-tech sex toy in the shape of a man, a mother convinced that her children are from another planet, and orphaned twin sisters who work as futuristic strippers. As they strive for intimacy and struggle to resolve their fraught relationships with each other, and with themselves, we realise these dystopias are uncannily close to our own world.
By turns surreal, witty, and perplexing, these bewitching stories are ultimately a reflection of our own reality and of the biggest existential questions we all face
Helen Phillips is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, the Italo Calvino Prize and more. She is the author of the widely acclaimed novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, also published by Pushkin Press. Her debut collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable book by The Story Prize. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, and The New York Times. An assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.