CARDINAL AND OTHER STORIES

A man returning a tuxedo suddenly follows a parking lot attendant home; a volunteer recovery worker finds himself re-enacting a deadly fire; a husband parses the meaning of his wife's online banking password; a hack musician travels to a German math institute. Post-Facebook, post-subprime crisis, and post-prosperity, the fearlessly deadpan characters in Alex Higley's debut collection navigate the bleak and surreal suburbs from Phoenix to Chicago with minimal instincts for self-preservation--and with quietly explosive results.

Stylish, perfectly controlled, and pleasurably shocking, Higley's brilliantly subversive portraits of a lost generation reconfigure and reinvent the increasingly complex relationships between art, life, and the people we love.

Alex Higley's stories have appeared in New World Writing, PANK, Hobart, Fanzine, Paper Darts, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He contributed text to Alec Soth's The Frank Album. He is working on a novel.