Anhedonia

<p><em>Anhedonia</em> is a surreal interlinked collection of short stories that follows a constellation of artists drifting through the world with ink-stained hands and hollowed hearts. Each narrator is a writer poet or dreamer whose devotion to the written word has eclipsed the contours of ordinary life leaving them brilliant broken and strangely weightless.</p><p>Across continents and languages an unstable author survives on half-eaten restaurant leftovers convinced that employment would rob him of the few lucid hours he has to chase his masterpiece. A luminous poet-beautiful talented and quietly ruthless-moves into her boyfriend's apartment not out of love but convenience treating relationships as temporary shelters for her creative storms. And in the haunting title story an emotionally vacant writer wanders through life as if observing it from outside his body dissecting moments he never fully lives cataloguing emotions he cannot feel.</p><p>Bound together by their loneliness obsessions and the ache of creation the characters in <em>Anhedonia</em> speak in fractured dreamlike depressive voices. Their realities warp and shimmer as the boundary between life and art dissolves: lovers become metaphors apartments turn into cages cities blur into notebooks and ambitions devour whatever tenderness remains.</p><p>Bleak darkly funny and strangely tender <em>Anhedonia</em> is a portrait of artists who have given everything to their craft-except perhaps their ability to live.</p>