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Dust, Short Stories

A daring debut collection, Dust dives headfirst into the complicated waters of youth. Exploring themes of alienation, longing, self-destruction and ultimately self-awareness, the characters in Dust attempt to find meaning and form connections via sex, art, drugs, apple seeds, a cardboard dreamachine, and an aloe vera plant. 

 

In “Ten Days,” a pothead bike messenger squats in the hip downtown apartment of a girl he doesn’t know, which begins a strange affair with her diary. During “The Test,” a backpacker couple visits The Church of Scientology as a rainy day experiment, which ends up testing more than they’d anticipated.

 

“Skills” is set in a college group therapy session, while “May Day” takes place in a Staten Island backyard, where eccentric outcasts perform an ancient ceremony. The Batman-loving tween of “Anything to Save Her” attempts to rescue his sister from a ‘dangerous’ boyfriend, while the shy child of “In Limbo” is kidnapped by an artistic loner.

 

Littered with songs, secrets, subculture, and a touch of the surreal, the fourteen stories in Dust shed light on the harsh realities of growing up and making decisions in our modern world.

Dust short stories, Dust, Short Stories, Amy Dupcak
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Amy Dupcak is the author of Dust, Short Stories (2016). Her fiction and creative nonfiction were published in Sonora Review, Phoebe, Hypertext, Fringe, Litro, Bookanista, and other journals, and her poems have appeared in District Lit, Pangyrus, The Night Heron Barks, and Alternative Field & Avenue 50 Studio’s “Poetry in Isolation” chapbook. She earned her MFA in Fiction from The New School and has been a creative and essay writing instructor at Writopia Lab since 2012, primarily working with teens. Currently, she also freelance edits and tutors, teaches fiction for adults at The Writer’s Rock, acts as an assistant editor of Cagibi, and crafts original themed trivia for every Lyrics, Lit & Liquor event. 

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