2024 SPARKS Literary Festival Featured Title!

DESCRIPTION

Allison Graves’ edgy debut collection of short fiction scrutinizes unconventional and confused attachments between people and the reasons they last. The extraordinary becomes the ordinary as people navigate the weird, the quirky, and the sad aspects of everyday life.

Through encounters in retail and fast food chains, on highways and dating apps, the characters in this collection wander through the non-places of our modern lives. The stories connect readers to the spaces that ultimately make them feel lost—zones for reconsideration. Delving into the confusion and boredom of everyday life, Graves’ fiction documents the emotional experiences and disillusionment of middle-class millennials seeking a meaningful life in both the isolating and the ordinary.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allison Graves received her BA in English literature from Dalhousie University and her MA in creative writing from Memorial University, where she wrote this collection of short stories. Her fiction has won Room magazine’s annual fiction contest and the Newfoundland Arts and Letters Award. She is the current fiction editor of Riddle Fence. She is doing a PhD at Memorial and likes to play drums and climb Signal Hill.