Are People Out There

With the publication of 2022’s Small Moods came the arrival of a bizarre and playful voice in contemporary fiction. Garielle Lutz called the stories in that book, “by turns sweet-hearted and ruthless, loopy and doleful, otherworldly and ribald, but always inventively off-kilter and entirely on the mark in their raucous sweeps of human ache and ecstasy.” And someone named Sarah on Goodreads wrote, “This was the weirdest collection of stories I’ve ever read and I was so confused just about all of the time. It was great.”
Now comes Are People Out There, the second collection of short, daring, hilarious, and cursed fictions from Shane Kowalski. It deals in the inimitable Kowalski manner with the usual kinds of people and the lives, or double-lives, they lead: men who steal babies’ identities, women who become dogs to rich couples on the weekend, neighbors who build guillotines in their yards all summer, and teenagers who are haunted forever by their school plays, just to name a few. It is the irreducible strangeness of these stories that compels you, the reader, further into these other lives. If you go far enough, you may even recognize your own life amongst them.

“Shane Kowalski is a magician of short fiction, and this collection shows him at his trickiest, cleverest, and funniest.” — Ling Ma, author of Severance

“Shane Kowalski is one of our finest writers of short fiction. And it becomes truer. In Are People Out There Kowalski thrums in the vein of Daniil Kharms, Russell Edson, and Donald Barthelme and also at once operates prismatically in a register wholly his own.”
—Sebastian Castillo, author of Fresh, Green Life