David Boles

In October 1972, a seven-year-old boy in Nebraska sat on red shag carpeting in front of a wood-grain television console and absorbed the full commercial curriculum of Saturday morning. He did not know he was being trained. That is the central finding of this book.

Four disembodied cat heads drift through deep space in Life Helmets, searching for their missing bodies. A puppy head who has never had a body searches with them. The soup is stirring in the wrong direction. The quest continues. Whiskerfluff is the captain because someone has to be.

Paris, August 19, 1839. François Arago reads the technical details of Louis Daguerre's photographic process into the joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Within weeks the satirical press is mocking photographers as mechanics and copyists.

In March 1867, Ezekiel Washington, a Black veteran of the 5th U.S. Colored Troops, files a homestead claim on 160 acres of Nebraska prairie. He builds a soddie with his own hands, breaks the sod, plants corn, and waits for the land to become his.

Nobody teaches you how to grieve. This is the strange truth at the center of an experience so common it touches every person who has ever lived long enough to lose someone.

A Fractional Fiction Novel. A freelance audio engineer in Columbus, Ohio, is hired to clone the voice of a county commissioner and fabricate a recording of a conversation that never took place.

One year after going public, Elle, Meen, Teena, and Tal have become symbols in a national debate about powered individuals.

A pharmacist's grandson discovers that art is the oldest prescription in Western civilization.

Walk south on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta on any Tuesday morning in 2026, and you will pass through more layers of surveillance than a federal inmate encountered in a maximum-security facility in 1975. You will not feel them. That is the point.

At the Emain Institute, a private psychiatric facility on the Hudson River, Dr. Francis Morrow documents patients whose visions defy clinical explanation. Cesare speaks prophecies in his sleep. Deirdre sees her own death in multiple versions, each ending different, none of them false.

A boy stands in a bathroom and discovers his face can change. Asa Greer is five years old when the mirror shows him something that should be impossible: the features of the boy next door, worn on his own skull. The borrowed face lasts three seconds. The cost is permanent.

Abandoned in Place is a work of cultural criticism that traces the pattern of institutional abandonment from the personal to the political. Beginning with the author's own childhood, the book identifies the grammar by which abandonment is disguised.

Three months after escaping the tunnels beneath New York City, Elle, Meen, and Teena find themselves under constant surveillance. Prometheus Applied Sciences hasn't forgotten them, and a new operative named Sarah Miller has infiltrated their lives as a volunteer at the group home.

Dr. Lena Vasquez sees something in the data that the statistics do not measure. A gravitational lensing researcher at the University of Chicago, Lena finds a periodic oscillation in the dark matter density profile of a candidate dark galaxy.

The light that touches your face right now left the sun eight minutes ago. You have never seen the present sun. No one has. Every act of writing shares this property. The moment a word is set down, it begins traveling away from the person who wrote it.

Who decides what a character is on the American stage? The playwright who created the character, or the institution that controls the production?

An Autopsy of Urban Collapse. In late September 2013, a road crew buried 150-year-old cobblestones under fresh asphalt on Baldwin Avenue in the Jersey City Heights. Something durable was concealed beneath something disposable, for the convenience of the least permanent users of the road.

There is a sign on a wall at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, mounted above a narrow shelf. The sign bears the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, a text telephone that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone.

The title comes from "The Atomic Man," the seventh story in the collection, where a teenager named Calvin Reece understands what he has become. He has become light: the loneliest thing in the universe, touching everything, holding nothing. But the phrase describes all twelve protagonists.

Robert was a garbage man before the system made such work obsolete. He spent decades watching what people threw away, learning the difference between what households claimed to value and what they actually discarded.