The Reincarnations

Fast-moving and deeply felt stories, sharply envisioned and lit with humor and compassion. Nathan Elias writes like he’s lived a thousand lives.

• Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying

Nathan Elias’s fearless debut collection is a genre defying labyrinth of loss and heartache. From machines that might let you talk to the dead to pills that will make you fall out of love, these deft stories signal a tremendous talent in capturing what it means to be human in this or other realities.

• Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone

These loosely connected stories are laced with the familiar and the uncanny, the real and the surreal, the ordinary and the fabulistic. A documentary filmmaker refuses to give up on finding his daughter who mysteriously disappears by the river. A small-time real estate agent recovers from a brief psychotic episode upon discovering his fiancee’s affair. An actress struggles to grasp reality when the recordings of lucid dreams are used in movies instead of live performances. An eccentric teenager recounts his first romance from beyond the grave.

Spanning the boundaries of literary and speculative fiction, The Reincarnations revolves around multiple forms of Zenlike rebirth. Equal parts raw emotion and wild imagination, Nathan Elias’s debut story collection ushers in an electrifying yet tender new voice in fiction.