Fictions by Miranda Mellis

None of This Is Real imagines a not-too-alternate reality of philosophical children, reincarnating chimeras, mutant matriarchies, and kind seers adapting to affliction. These five fictions question what is knowable and what actions can be taken in the face of loss — of family, heritage, ecosystems, agency, and power. A face incapable of masking its sneering rebellions; young sisters in search of their missing mother; a page whose very body extracts meaning from occult readings in response to alienation; a never-ending line for coffee that becomes a surreal site of quotidian wars in miniature; a nightmare future of scientific subjugation and regenerate seekers — this first collection by the author of The Revisionist illuminates the gap between institutional powers and those failed by, or otherwise mortally at odds with, those powers. Drawing inspiration from absurdism, noir, fairy tales, and the occult, None of This is Real brings the playfulness of contemporary fabulism to bear on today’s pressing ethical and political issues, exploring the potential and limits of magical thinking with empathy, subtle humor, and an engrossing mastery of the fictional form.

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Click to hear Miranda read on KQED's The Writers' Block

Cover art by Monica Canilao

“Miranda Mellis’s new collection acts like an unruly Greek Chorus—hard to discern individual voices; the work’s strength lies in its homophonic nature. The shared crisis of her characters is worth an intense study, all the more because Mellis is a rare bird who can mold complex existentialism into a respectable 115 pages." — Molly Gallentine, The Rumpus

“This is the problem that Mellis’s characters confront, over and over: what to do with themselves, stranded somehow in their bodies by their suspicion that the something more that they are that isn’t corporeal is not just immaterial but unmanageable and inhuman.” — Gabriel Blackwell, HTMLGiant

• The Rumpus reviews None of This Is Real
• HTMLGiant reviews None of This Is Real
• Green Apple Books interview with Miranda Mellis as part of Apple-a-Month book club