June 2024
A gun-toting conspiracy theorist breaks into a famous actor’s house to search for kidnapped children. An impulsive warehouse laborer drops a dangerous quantity of LSD in the middle of a daytime shift in an attempt to build a friendship with his aloof coworker. A lead actress falls in love with her ursine costar while shooting a new movie in Alaska. A guitarist in a local hardcore band finds herself caught up in a wild chase through a strip mall after her most prized possession is stolen in the middle of a show. And a millennial couple encounters naked cult members, a transatlantic highway, the ghost of Robert Oppenheimer, and microscopic people in their teeth, all while trying to navigate the ups and downs of their years-long relationship. In this collection of weird, dark, and moving short stories, these characters and others grapple with the strangeness and chaos of living in a world where anything is possible and nothing makes sense.
Blurbs for The Great Atlantic Highway & Other Stories by Steve Gergley:
"Steve Gergley's stories are funny, sinister, and disorientingly off-kilter. Taken as a whole, this book creates an immersive and haunting world of its own, a shadow that will follow you for long after you've finished the book." - Dan Chaon, author of Among the Missing and Stay Awake.
“Steve Gergley’s stories are meticulously weird, tender, and hilarious. Be careful with The Great Atlantic Highway & Other Stories—it will induce you down a stretch of interstate with exits that only lead to something strange and beautiful and exciting!” – Shane Kowalski, author of Small Moods.
“From Gergley's vast breadth of imagination comes a new collection of nearly 50 short stories. Some are a dozen pages long, while others are under 500 words. Through this hyperactive, humorous, and horrifying display, we see human statues, ruthless gods, impossible bridges, and Schwarzenegger chat rooms. We see a soldier falling from the sky and a window inside of a tooth. Vengeful murder, bears, actors, and apples. Hardcore vs. death metal. A blurring between video game and dream. A modernist approach with a biblical gaze. It all takes place inside a brutalist society atop a brutalist planet so the magic that (frequently) happens is splattered in grit. Opening this book feels like visiting a drug dealer in an abandoned mall. Pocket a lighter. Bring a knife.” - Ben Niespodziany, author of No Farther than the End of the Street and Cardboard Clouds.
“These stories are a little like if Tim Robinson went to get an MFA but was mostly too weird for the program and then wrote a book where he really got to let his voice shine instead of spending a couple years on SNL before I Think You Should Leave. Which is unfair and not-quite-right in a myriad of ways (to MFAs and SNL and Tim Robinson and Gergley himself and maybe even you?), but there's something about these stories that is both recognizable and not, both in the lineage of other favorites and also uniquely their own. These characters want to be human, but struggle at just how to do so, and their actions and decisions and the very mechanics of the story that are the most surreal are often the most honest and true, and also vice versa.” – Aaron Burch, Author of Year of the Buffalo; Editor of HAD
