This week’s other featured books, “The Bridge to Magic,” by Alex Thornbury, “Vestiges,” by Mercedes Lawry and “Billy Balloon, “by Jack Payton, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors page.
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THE BOOK: Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments
PUBLISHED IN: 2021.
THE AUTHOR: Jackson Bliss
THE EDITOR: Carmen Giménez-Smith & John Darcy
THE PUBLISHER: Noemi Press
SUMMARY: Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments is a celebration of the infinite ways in which stories can be told, challenged, imagined, and subverted. From a fragmented ransom note to hanging footnotes, a contemporary fairy tale to coded text, intersecting pieces of flash fiction about driving to a backwards story about gradual blindness, a listicle about challenging corporate culture to how-to guides for performing wokeness, a Chicago intersection with eight separate destinies to an impossible dating application, Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments is an exploration of not just mixed-race/hapa identity in Michigan (and the American Midwest), but also a triumphant affirmation of the world we live in, the people we love, the worlds we imagined, and the people we should have been with.
THE BACK STORY: I wanted to write a short story collection about mixed-race/Nisei identity, art, love, & storytelling that complicated but also expanded the Midwestern & Michigan short story collection, which are overrepresented by white dudes. I remember growing up in Northern Michigan, Southern California, and Chicago, and just never seeing short stories written by people like me who were racially & culturally hyphenated, who were the son of Japanese immigrants on my mom’s side, and who found redemption in love, art, & the infinite ways that we could tell stories about the world, about others, & about ourselves. I wrote the first short story in this collection in 2000 but didn’t didn’t even conceptualize this book or understand its major thematic connections until I first started sending it out to small presses back in 2014. I worked on it off and on from 2013 until 2019 when I submitted it to Noemi Press for their Book Prize in Prose. Just as I was about to sign a contract with the always-amazing Wayne State Press for their Made in Michigan series, I got an email from Noemi saying I’d won their prose contest and I was like, “Well shit, that was unexpected.” So, I guess it took me somewhere between seven and fourteen years to write, depending on your metrics.
WHY THIS TITLE?: Growing up, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of how different all of our lives would have been if we had made different decisions. Not necessarily better decisions, just different ones. And this idea is really at heart a counterfactual daydream. Like, for example, how different would my life had been if I had psyched myself out of applying to MFA programs or if I’d stayed in Buenos Aires instead of returning to the States or I’d been accepted into the JET program and gone off to the motherland instead of meeting my wife who has been the love of my life for sixteen years and counting. So, this book explores a bunch of different ways in which the plot lines & the destinies of characters change radically depending on not just the decisions they made, but the decisions that readers make since there’s a choose-your-own-adventure menu after every short story written in the style & voice of one of the other short stories
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? This book is really custom made for readers of literary fiction, AAPI fiction, mixed-race fiction, experimental/conceptual fiction, short story collections, stories that take place in the Midwest. Also, readers who like to travel inside their mind, learn about the world, consider the beauty & the power of our own choices as human beings, & see their world differently will really enjoy this collection. One reviewer on Good Reads said that this book, much like going to a museum, changed the way she saw the world & I can’t think of a bigger compliment than that.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
“Jackson Bliss’ experimental love stories are experimental because they must be, because the lives of his mixed-race, marginalized characters are, for the most part, unheard, unsung. To the Midwest canon, Bliss has added not simply literature but a nuanced counterfactual history.” —Cleveland Review of Books
“Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments is Jackson’s first book and is as fine an introduction to his ecstatic and heartbreaking work as I can imagine.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Jackson Bliss’s debut book of fiction, Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments is exactly what the title claims—a collection of exciting, bold experiments that stretch the notion of what a story can be. Of the thirteen stories in it, no two share the same form. Yet underneath the narrative invention, the genre-bending fireworks, and the speculative characters, Bliss’s stories are meditations on classic themes: time, autonomy, race, and, of course, love.” —ZYZZYVA
“Among the much-deserved, sky-high praise for Jackson Bliss’s brand-new short fiction collection . . . this [book] is indeed kaleidoscopic: wild and vivid at one turn, astute and contemplative the next, these are stories you tumble inside, bright portals to compelling people and places and circumstances that, like love itself, feel both universal and wholly unique.” —Juked
AUTHOR PROFILE: I’ve been writing seriously since college. After I got rejected from my college’s creative writing program that didn’t accept upperclassmen (& I transferred there as a junior, so I never had a chance), I realized really quickly that I found consolation, self-understanding, & cultural insight in writing. No one had to tell me to write. I didn’t need a workshop to tell me to write, (though I would have loved one in college), but ultimately I found my voice & my purpose in my writing. At its core, my writing is really about love: the love I have for people who are all trying to make sense of their brief time on earth, the love I have for those trying to understand themselves, the love I have for those fighting for a better world, for equity & representation, the love I have for those who see empathy, vulnerability, sensitivity, creativity, imagination, inner strength, self-awareness, & joy as strengths and not weaknesses. I published three books in the space of ten months–Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments in October 2021, Amnesia of June Bugs in April 2022, my backwards novel about four BIPOC characters from NYC, Chicago, & Paris whose lives intersect on the C Train as Hurricane Sandy hits, and Dream Pop Origami in July 2022, my choose-your-own-adventure memoir about mixed-race identity, love, travel, & language–and all three are predicated on the redemption I see in love, storytelling, language, & the imagination.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: If I can get readers to reconsider reality or look at things differently or celebrate the unique cultural technology of storytelling or if I can get them to stop everything for a couple minutes & simply savor the brief momentary beauty of this crumbling world in the middle of all this chaos we’ve been facing for so long, then I feel like I’ve done my job.
SAMPLE: Here’s my Amazon page: https://amzn.to/3HyMr5g
LOCAL OUTLETS: Skylight Books: https://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9781934819975 (local bookstore), Powell’s Books: https://www.powells.com/book/-9781934819975, Noemi Press: http://www.noemipress.org/catalog/prose/counterfactual-love-stories/
WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Amazon: https://amzn.to/3HyMr5g, Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/%22Jackson%20Bliss%22?Ntk=P_key_Contributor_List&Ns=P_Sales_Rank&Ntx=mode+matchall,
PRICE: $18
CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jacksonbliss, IG: https://www.instagram.com/jacksonbliss/, Substack: https://jacksonbliss.substack.com/, & Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jacksonbliss/
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 