Everything Abridged STORIES

BY DENNARD DAYLE

Praise for Everything Abridged

“By turns prescient of our anxious, conspiracy–fraught times and mournful of majestic worlds to come ruined by all too familiar hatreds. But the post–WWIII stand–up riffs? Truly funny stuff.”

Vulture

“Incredibly entertaining and so damn illuminating.”

Entertainment Weekly

“Slyly defiant and blazingly imaginative, like the best modernist literature, Everything Abridged is a powerful celebration of flaw and failure. It’s a book that revels in the timelessness of obsolescence and the freedom of powerlessness. Dayle’s a genre–shattering writer, whose wit and intellect never cease to entertain. This refreshingly original and powerfully funny collection is a debut to remember.” Paul Beatty, New York Times bestselling author

“Everything Abridged: Stories by Dennard Dayle:

1. Miscategorized. Calling this addictively book–shaped act of language subversion “stories” is like calling New York City “buildings”

2. The nonstandard reference to all sorts of things it would have been disturbing to learn if you hadn’t been laughing so hard

3. Herald of a major new talent—what more do you need to know? Why are you still reading the cover and not the inside?”

Susan Choi, National Book Award–winning author of Trust Exercise

Framed as a reference work of humorous “entries” that offer trenchant social commentary, Everything Abridged presages a dark vision of the near future but tells jokes in the face of it: An intelligence agency operative uncovers a conspiracy to generate conspiracies and realizes his participation in the scheme. A Caribbean monarch meets four decades of American presidents and adjusts his country’s foreign policy accordingly. Experiment participants are asked to bring back a gun as quickly as possible. A copywriter on a space colony advertises a weapon with the potential to destroy his home during an intergalactic war.

These and other linked stories, many of which feature a speculative bent—about being Black in America, law enforcement practices in an android society, Olympic speed walking, consumerism, nuclear war, and more—are interspersed with hilarious, one–line definitions for words ranging from abolition to zygote, creating a sharply humorous portrait of American inequality. With his singular wit, sharp prose, and shrewd observations, Dennard Dayle captures the struggles his characters face to keep hold of their sanity in a society collapsing into chaos and absurdity.

Dennard Dayle is a Jamaican–American writer from New York City. He is a graduate of Princeton University and received his MFA from Columbia University. His short fiction has been published by Clarkesworld, Matchbook, the Hard Times, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency Everything Abridged is his debut collection.

Selling Points

AUTHOR CONNECTIONS: The author is well–connected in literary circles and with writers, including Paul Beatty, Jessi Jezewska Stevens, Gary Shteyngart, and Paul La Farge, all of whom will be approached for support of the book’s publication.

TARGETED AUDIENCE: For readers of David Wong’s This Book is Full of Spiders, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, George Saunders's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Lincoln in the Bardo, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash

SATIRE AS AUTHOR’S BRAND: Dayle is a political performance artist whose most recent stunt—a series of satirical political mailers skewering the New York City mayoral candidates—was shared on Twitter thousands of times and amassed nearly 50,000 likes.

SPECIFICATIONS

* 368 pages

* WIDTH: 5 1/2" - 152mm

* HEIGHT: 8 1/4" - 229mm

* Paperback

PUB MONTH: APRIL 2023

FICTION

ISBN 978-1-4197-6097-6

US $17.00