Available in paperback in-store.  PG-13 for some taboo themes and a bit of nudity and violence.  Foodies will love this one.

Book Description

What’s inside a brown paper bag? More than you’d expect.

Could thirty stories about an ordinary item be a portal into your own inner life? What about the life of a genie trapped inside one for decades? Or a peach waiting to be ripened and ants fighting over a ham sandwich?

These wacky and poignant stories will resonate with anyone who feels like they live the life of an oddball in a pinball machine. You’ll bounce off a variety of genres, explore themes you’ve kept hidden from yourself and others, and discover narrative magic.

This anthology is an invitation to a séance, and the brown paper bag is the Ouija board. Read this book if you think you’re a ghost. Read it if you think you’ve been a misunderstood metaphor. Read it to explore what’s on the other side of the portal.

Open the bag. See what’s inside.
Would it terrify you? It should—and make you smile.

Introduction

This anthology began as a writing exercise built around a notorious prompt: write a story about a brown paper bag. I set out to write thirty, partly to push my prose and otherwise to see how far a mundane object could be stretched before it tore. It turned out to be farther than I expected.

The bag became a portal into the unexpected—a lens for satire, a vessel for memory, a character in its own right. You’ll meet anxious worms, unhinged gameshow contestants, oddball lovers, warring ants, anthropomorphized fruit, and demon-possessed kids, among others. You’ll be transported to compost piles, garbage bins, disco parties, bedrooms, factory floors, and even inside a ham sandwich, to name a few. Expect to travel back in time and into the far future.

The thirty stories aren’t arranged by topic, genre, or style. Instead, the order leans into tonal shifts, narrative experimentation, and discordant motifs. For instance, absurdist horror brushing up against tender realism; surreal comic erotica giving way to a poignant confessional.  Taken together, the stories behave less like isolated pieces and more like parts of a cohesive universe. For the first read, I recommend following the order as it unfolds. After that, feel free to wander.

If there is a unifying impulse here, it’s a curiosity about familiar lives and objects. The brown paper bag shows us who and what they really are—perhaps stranger and funnier than we ever imagined; or more fragile and confused than they appear. And if, by the end, the ordinary feels less fixed and more alive than it did before, then the bag has done its job.