VIRAL

A dazzling collection about how the familiar can suddenly turn strange, for readers of Lydia Davis, George Saunders, and Karen Russell: Viral is about being lost in places that are supposed to feel like home.

A strange guidebook tells foreign visitors how to travel in a recognizable but dreamlike United States where mirrors are haunted and the Statue of Liberty wears a bowler hat; a supervisor in a department store must discipline his employees for failing to smile enough at their customers and finds himself unexpectedly drawn to the saddest of them all; a woman agrees to buy her daughter a robot pet to help her cope after a divorce, then is horrified when her little girl chooses an enormous spider for a companion. The characters in these mesmerizing stories find that the world they thought they knew has shifted and changed, become bizarre, disorienting, and, occasionally, miraculous. Told with absurdist humor and sweet sadness, Viral is about being lost in places that are supposed to feel like home. Emily Mitchell's stories have been published in Harper’s, Ploughshares, New England Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Maryland and is the author of the novel The Last Summer of the World.