Dream City and Other Stories

At 5:51, a painter with four months to live presses a revolver to his chest and pulls the trigger. The hammer falls on an empty chamber, and his wife sleeps on, an arm's length away.

Forty-one more stories follow.

In "The Room," a widowed motel owner north of Tucson charges fifty dollars cash for two hours in Room 7, where handwriting covers every wall and comes up through three coats of primer.

In "Sugarcoated Prison," a Coca-Cola can eleven days from its expiration date waits in Row C-3 of an office drink machine, beside a Mountain Dew with a pinhole leak.

In "The Knock," an astronaut on a two-man ship finds his crewmate outside the porthole on a cut tether, begging to be let in, while the same crewmate floats at his shoulder inside.

In "The Great Battle of Karánsebes," an army of eighty thousand marches across a plain in September 1788 after an enemy nobody has seen, and its hussars buy six barrels of plum brandy along the way.

In "National Pornographic," three friends point a telephoto lens at their neighbors' bedroom windows and post the clips with a nature-documentary voiceover.

The connective tissue is a voice that trusts the reader enough to leave the worst parts unsaid.

Dream City and Other Stories is Cristian Mihai's first short fiction collection: forty-two stories of literary horror, dark comedy, satire, crime, science fiction, and historical absurdism. This fifth edition carries a heavily revised text. The collection suits readers of Chuck Palahniuk, George Saunders, Carmen Maria Machado, and Denis Johnson.

Some stories contain explicit sex, graphic violence, suicide, drug use, and harm to children and animals.