The Younger and Other Stories

By Daniel J. O’Malley

Hub City Press, April 13, 2027

The stories in this haunting debut capture the moments when circumstances shift, when life drifts off course, when the ordinary gradually—sometimes suddenly—dissolves and offers a glimpse at how truly strange this world might be.

A boy shows up on a couple’s porch one day and gently works his way into their life. Two friends see a knife in a field and find themselves caught up in a frightening game. A girl finds a puppy in a roadside ditch and smuggles it home, toward a future she might regret, while a father, a widower haunted by an iguana, relives the horrors of his past, and a mother wonders what to do when her son brings home a bone he found in the woods, then more bones, more and more…

By turns tender and unsettling, The Younger and Other Stories gives portraits of characters in isolation, struggling to make sense of things, lonely boys and girls, men and women, wandering the woods and highways looking for people they might call family, places they might call home. This is a world where games have consequences, though the rules aren’t always clear. In prose elemental and precise, O’Malley navigates the spaces in between–old and young, land and water, wild and tame, what is and what might be–and shows us a world just strange enough to be our own.

About the Author

Daniel J. O'Malley's fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Granta, Subtropics, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts. He grew up in Missouri and currently lives in West Virginia, where he teaches at Marshall University.

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