How We Got Into This

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Flooded cities a fallout shelter a backstage maze an amnesiac forest: the stories in this collection take place on the boundary between the familiar and the strange. Their protagonists scavenge for traces of forgotten territories often getting lost in the process. They also dig holes venture into lands of the dead steal plums study sea creatures and stumble off the end of a pier. Eerie moody and unpredictable the stories in </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>How We Got Into This</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> chart our yearnings to unlearn the world.</span></p><p><br></p><p><strong>Advance Praise for <em>How We Got Into This</em></strong></p><p>Michael Holt's writing is <span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>beautiful and absorbing and spellbinding and rhythmically soothing as if you were on a boat sailing away into an ever-swelling mild apocalypse.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>--Vi Khi Nao author of </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>The Italy Letters</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> and </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Swimming With Dead Stars</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>An ethereal collection that feels at once pertinent to the supremely surreal dislocation of our current epoch (eco-catastrophe generational warfare global pandemics and all) and also unmoored from the constriction of chronology. The result are fictions that refuse to be categorized as either warning or elegy but are both at the same time. Reader take note because the voices that are speaking in Holt's trenchant tales are the ones that have come before us the ones that will follow after us and perhaps</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>most strikingly they are our own.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>--Sarah Blackman author of </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Mother Box</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> and </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Hex</em></p><p><br></p><p>A striking unexpected intimate portrayal of the strangeness of everyday life.<span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> In these stories you will find ways of living and ways of dying which as you read on become the natural course of things. </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>How We Got Into This</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> does what all good books do-it returns to us not only the lost but also the never-experienced.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>--Christina Tudor-Sideri author of </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Schism Blue</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> and </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Disembodied</em></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>