Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

The fiction of multiple awardndashwinning author China Mieacuteville is powered by intelligence and imagination Like George Saunders Karen Russell and David Mitchell he pulls from a variety of genres with equal facility employing the fantastic not to escape from reality but instead to interrogate it in provocative unexpected ways London awakes one morning to find itself besieged by a sky full of floating icebergs Destroyed oil rigs mysteriously reborn clamber from the sea and onto the land driven by an obscure but violent purpose An anatomy student cuts open a cadaver to discover impossibly intricate designs carved into a corpsersquos bonesmdashdesigns clearly present from birth bearing mute testimony to what Of such concepts and unforgettable images are made the twenty-eight stories in this collectionmdashmany published here for the first time By turns speculative satirical and heart-wrenching fresh in form and language and featuring a cast of damaged yet hopeful seekers who come face-to-face with the deep weirdness of the worldmdashand at times the deeper weirdness of themselvesmdashThree Moments of an Explosion is a fitting showcase for one of literaturersquos most original voicesAdvance praise for Three Moments of an Explosion ldquoHorror noir fantasy politics and poetry swirl into combinations as satisfying intellectually as they are emotionally Bradbury meets Borges with Lovecraft gibbering tumultuously just out of hearingrdquomdashKirkus Reviews starred review ldquoMieacuteville moves effortlessly among realism fantasy and surrealism in this dark sometimes horrific short story collection His characters whether ordinary witnesses to extraordinary events or lunatics operating out of inexplicable compulsions are invariably well drawn and compelling Above all what the stories have in common is a sense that the world is not just strange but stranger than we can ever really comprehendrdquomdashPublishers Weekly starred review.