Some Stupid Glow: Stories - Softcover

Fuller, TJ

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1943888310 ISBN 13: 9781943888313

Verlag: Featherproof Books, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A darkly funny and sometimes surreal debut collection about people grasping for meaning in a world that keeps slipping sideways.

The characters in TJ Fuller’s debut collection are desperate. They want their lives to mean something. They seek solace in work, validation and hope in others. And they fail. A lot. The songs they sing us hit home—and they hit hard—but not without humor, grace, and some straight-up weirdness.

The title story allows the reader to explore, in a Choose Your Own Adventure style, how a young woman navigates the increasingly maddening choices she must make. "Damn Us All" follows a man trying on & swapping out deities like so many pairs of socks, seeking something—anything—which will finally make sense. A door-to-door salesman in "Doorbell Songs" starts snooping in places he doesn't belong and crossing lines he hadn't previously considered, just begging to be caught. "Slim Fit" sees what it would be like to actually live inside a jeans commercial.

At times speculative and/or surreal and/or funny-as-hell, these stories set in the Pacific Northwest feature as many Philip Seymour Hoffmans as you can imagine, even more dream versions of yourself, aging backyard wrestlers, homeless gamblers, and much more. Let TJ tell you some tales you won’t soon forget.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

TJ Fuller's stories have been featured in The Columbia Journal, Juked, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and other journals. His work has also been included in two anthologies, What I Thought of Ain't Funny, based on the work of Mitch Hedberg, and And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative.He earned an M.F.A. in fiction from Eastern Washington University, and has been accepted to both Tin House and Sewanee summer workshops. Some Stupid Glow is his first book.

TJ Fuller lives in Portland, OR.

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“Dizzy Llamas” from the short-story collection Some Stupid Glow

Time loses the vertical hold. My seven-year-old, Emmy, will never know what that means—the way televisions used to skitter and the little knob that grabbed control—but she can see the house lost in time. The room has no idea what year it is. This is the house I grew up in, filling with Rogers, mes from every year I’ve been stuck in this town. I choke on a beer bong and finger paint the fireplace and steal my mother’s menthols and try to protect my daughter.

Eight-year-old me won’t stop lighting matches. Sixteen-year-old me cannot carry a tune. I try to hide the Rogers, but there are too many. Emmy glances between the older ones and me. She asks about their comic books and golf clubs. The other Rogers are not as annoyed. They show her squirt guns and magic tricks before they waver away.

I knew this house was glitchy, but when my wife left, I needed some place to batten down. The living room used to fill with forms of my mother, smoking and preaching and fighting. She taught me to settle the time. Straighten it. And as I got older, I rolled it on purpose, so I could see her high again, so I could see her cry at records, brush her hippie hair, giggle and chase the neighbor boys.


I cannot focus long enough to regain the room’s balance. Even though I know how, it’s no small feat to set it right. Emmy needs my attention. She has the attention of thirteen mes, and it is not enough. She shows all of us her stuffed sloth and handstand.

How will Emmy explain what happens here? Time opened too many tabs? Time had a media playback error? My mother called it the skips. This is your fault, she said to me. You were supposed to be the missing piece, the stability this house needed. I had expected the same, a distance from the old Rogers, something unfamiliar about their easy sweat and loud doubt. Emmy lets one swing her around, but he vanishes and she falls. Shit. I shouldn’t curse. I grab her ten-year-old Roger’s candy. “Hey,” he calls and disappears.

The hold is loose long enough that other versions of Emmy start to blip in and out. With her thick wail and darling wobble. With fat black eyes and penciled toes. Sleepless me arrives. He cannot burp his daughter because he is afraid of killing her. He stares into her mewl and feels her funeral. I know. I can still feel it. I wonder if I let us keep slipping if I would get to see preteen Emmy, smoking Emmy—her with a beer in her hand and a boy on her phone.

“Look!” I call to sleepless me and point to today’s Emmy. “She makes it this far.” But I am in the anchor moment. The Rogers rolling in and out don’t remember where they’ve been. I am the one who has to hold on to this. To let it matter to the Rogers to come.

Rogers ahead of me wend across the room. Blinkered, pocked, they aim for the couch. I try to slow the room down, change direction. I don’t need to see what never changes. Is that Emmy unpacking in this same house? God forbid. She’d bring back feathered hair and bad records and big tears.

Seven-year-old Emmy trips and starts to cry. “Honey, honey,” I call. “Let’s play dizzy llamas.” We spin, lose our focus, don’t have to see anything—that’s the point of the game. She is free to blur, but I have to keep an eye out—that too is the point of the game, me the first to the floor to break her fall. She revs up, and I wait for the reeling to be too much. 

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Featherproof Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1943888310
• ISBN 13: 9781943888313
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 172
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar