All the Names They Used for God Stories

This short-story collection moves between genres, from science fiction to American Gothic, magical realism and horror. Each story is its own world, and in each a character struggles hard against fate.

One story is a dystopian tale of genetically modified septuplets struck down by a mysterious illness. Another is a love story about a man bewitched by a mermaid. A third imagines the lives of Nigerian schoolgirls after a Boko Haram kidnapping.

The characters are all reaching for the sublime, the way many people do. What they find on the way is a borderland where salvation and destruction sit close together. The stories test which side each person lands on, and none of them gets there easily.

The tone runs dark and strange. No two stories share a setting or a form, so each one asks the reader to settle into a new place, a new set of rules and a new kind of danger. The pull of the book is in that constant shift, with fate pressing on every character in a different way.

The collection won the Chautauqua Prize and was longlisted for the Story Prize.