Of This New World
Winner of the 2016 John Simmons Short Fiction Award, "Of This New World" offers a menagerie of utopias: real, imagined, and lost. Starting with the Garden of Eden and ending in a Mars colony, the stories wrestle with conflicts of idealism and practicality, communal ambition and individual kink. Stories jump between genres — from historical fiction to science fiction, realism to fabulism — but all ask that fundamental human question: is paradise really so impossible?
Over the course of 12 stories, Hyde writes with a mix of lyricism, humor and masterful detail. A group of environmental missionaries seeks to start an ideal ecosociety on an island in the Bahamas, only to unwittingly tyrannize the local inhabitants. The neglected daughter of a floundering hippie commune must adjust to conventional life with her ungroovy grandmother. Haunted by her years at a collegiate idyll, a young woman eulogizes a friendship. After indenturing his only son to the Shakers, an antebellum vegan turns to Louisa May Alcott’s famous family for help. And in the final story, a former drug addict chases a second chance at life in a government-sponsored space population program. An unmissable debut, the collection charts the worlds born in our dreams and bred in hope.
Bio
Allegra Hyde earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Arizona State University in 2015.
Praise for this book
Smart, stylish, and surprising, [this book] is an inventive compendium of paradises lost. Starting with a married couple expelled from a certain unnamed garden, the collection charts the journeys of assorted outcasts, drifters, hippies, and astronauts as they set out to find their personal utopias. ... An ambitious and memorable debut, in which a dozen different characters, looking for a dozen different paradises, all end up learning some customized version of that ultimate Miltonic lesson: ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’
Bennett Sims Judge, 2016 John Simmons Short Fiction Award
Hyde’s luminous prose and ability to inject meaning with subtlety keeps the collection on the darkly humorous edge of melancholy. Her characters face the encroaching darkness of the world head on, yet somehow continue to see a way out, finding that space where disaster opens innumerable possibilities to carve a new world from the ruins. This collection presents an appealing selection of diverse worlds from a bright and bold new voice in fiction.
Publishers Weekly
