BOOKS
EVERYONE WANTS TO BE AMBASSADOR TO FRANCE
A seagull, a goat, and a teenage boy enter into a bizarre love triangle that leaves one of them dead and the other two changed forever. A grief-stricken astronaut quits NASA to paint pictures of the moon. A lonely scientist creates stars in his basement and becomes enraged when he discovers that one of his stars harbors life. An eighteenth-century British aristocrat adopts two teenage girls and absconds with them to France, determined to raise one of them to become his perfect wife. By turns humorous and heartbreaking, this debut collection, which Foreword Review calls “a weird and singular work,” offers stories that dazzle, challenge, and ignite.
“I have been a longtime fan of Bryan Hurt’s stories and what a joy to have them all together now in this book! They are a soup pot of the funniest dry sentences plus unusual facts that he unearthed from who knows where, and an unstated humanity tucked inside those facts, and a constant eye on the oddness of culture and the lilt of a well-placed phrase and a carrot. In our endlessly data-packed world, Hurt’s keen sparseness is a welcome addition to the bookshelves.”
—Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France is swift and spare, a collection to devour and admire. Spectacular!”
—Aspen Matis, author of the internationally bestselling memoir Girl in the Woods
“The fictional love child of Miranda July, George Saunders, and A.M. Holmes, Hurt’s debut collection combines farfetchedness and dark humor with just enough tenderness to make everything feel true.”
—Courtney Maum, author of Touch
"The breadth of this collection is a phenomenal celebration, a catalogue of possibility, of the infinite versatility of short-form writing. Hurt's fabulist imagination, wicked dry humor, and core emotional truths challenge, dazzle, and ignite."
— Alissa Nutting, author of Tampa
“Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France is a weird and singular work, establishing Hurt as an imaginative writer with skill across genres.”
—Foreword Reviews, starred review
“This collection plants a flag on the moon, an accomplishment and a celebration, saying, like the astronaut in one of its stories, ‘I’m here. I’m here’.”
“Wonderfully absurd and weird stories.”
BUY NOW: Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Red Hen
WATCHLIST: 32 STORIES BY PERSONS OF INTEREST
In Watchlist, some of today’s most prominent and promising fiction writers from around the globe respond to, meditate on, and mine for inspiration the surveillance culture in which we live. With contributions from Etgar Keret, T.C. Boyle, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, and many more, WATCHLIST unforgettably confronts the question: What does it mean to be watched?
“A brave and necessary set of early flares of the literary imagination into the Panopticon we all find ourselves living inside these days.”
— Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude
“While I was reading Watchlist on my computer screen, a multilingual secret agent somewhere in Pyongyang, Beijing, or Moscow was reading over my shoulder, my computer screen on her computer screen, and under a mountain in Colorado, an NSA analyst was reading over her shoulder, my computer screen on her computer screen on his computer screen. What I'm trying to say is: you should read Watchlist, but you should read it on paper.”
—Kyle Minor, author of How to Disappear and Why
“Writers like T.C. Boyle and Cory Doctorow contributed to this surreal anthology of short stories that riff on our modern surveillance culture.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Including work by literary heavy–hitters... the anthology considers the act and weight of watching and being watched... and in Watchlist, these see–to–know quests range from funny to terrifying.”
—Los Angeles Magazine
“What Jonathan Lethem did for amnesia in his anthology The Vintage Book of Amnesia, Bryan Hurt does for surveillance with Watchlist — a genre of speculative fiction is firmly established.”
— The National Post
“Smart, eclectic and carefully observed, this collection illuminates the darker corners within our culture and within our private lives.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A boldly imaginative, diverse collection of 32 surveillance–themed stories from an international coterie of writers. . . . The varied cross–section of material is stylishly captured by each writer’s distinct voice and perspective.”
—Publishers Weekly
In this diverse and daring fiction collection, writers of all stripes deal with the act of watching and being watched, subverting and challenging surveillance’s obvious connotations and raising questions about our intricate dance with privacy and transparency.”
—Shelf Awareness
BUY NOW: Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Catapult
