The Good Worlds Are All Taken

A crippled musician spends a feverish night debating life and death with a series of voices real and spectral. A futuristic PR man struggles to make a star out of a feral girl with a hypnotic voice. Members of a fringe religious sect try to wring divine mercies from the intercessions of a doomed plague victim. In this debut collection, much of which comes from the pages of online culture journal Paraphilia Magazine, David Gionfriddo’s characters hunt for status, sense and succor in a series of all-too-familiar American dystopias, and find only uncertainty, disillusionment and a nagging sense of spiritual drift. The Good Worlds Are All Taken is, in turn, wavy funhouse mirror, Rorschach test card, and cracked crystal ball.