Everything Abridged: Stories
May 2022 · Abrams
Ebook
352
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About this ebook
“Incredibly entertaining and so damn illuminating” (Entertainment Weekly), Dennard Dayle’s electrifying and wholly original collection of satirical stories create a bitingly funny portrait of American racism, capitalism, and politics.
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
“Slyly defiant and blazingly imaginative . . . Dayle’s a genre-shattering writer, whose wit and intellect never cease to entertain.” —New York Times bestselling author Paul Beatty
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.
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
“Slyly defiant and blazingly imaginative . . . Dayle’s a genre-shattering writer, whose wit and intellect never cease to entertain.” —New York Times bestselling author Paul Beatty
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.
About the author
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 the New Yorker, Clarkesworld, Matchbook, the Hard Times, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and his satirical performance art has been covered by NBC, the New York Post, and New York magazine. Dayle is based in Brooklyn. Everything Abridged is his debut collection.
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