Age of Discovery and Other Stories

'At its essence, this enjoyable collection explores how nothing is ever exactly as it seems.'-Booklist These ingenious stories are so funny and sparkling and slyly inventive that their pain catches you by surprise, like a sunburn after a day at the beach. Eric PuchnerWinner, 2022 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Prize for Best FictionIn Becky Hagenston s fourth collection, the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. The characters are sex-toy sellers, internet trolls, parents, students, and babysitters all trying to make sense of a world where nothing is quite what it appears to be. A service robot makes increasingly disturbing requests. A middle school teacher is accused of witchcraft and realizes the accusations might be true. Two college students devise a way to avoid getting hit on in bars. A baker finds bizarre anomalies in his sourdough. A librarian follows her dead ex-husband through the Atlanta airport. In these stories, men and women confront grief, danger, loneliness, and sometimes the strangest discovery of all unexpected joy. Hagenston delivers a collection that is, at its weird and shining heart, about people discovering what for better or worse they are capable of.