PUBLICATION DATE: MARCH 2027

No one charts the borderland between dreams and reality, between the everyday and the fantastic, quite like Robert Freeman Wexler. This career-spanning collection of his shorter work—which includes his much-acclaimed novella “In Springfield Town” as well as new, previously unpublished stories—confirms Jeff VanderMeer’s estimation of Wexler as a leading exponent of “North American Surrealism.”

“Strange, sometimes whimsical, often nightmarish, usually surreal, the stories of Robert Freeman Wexler possess the sublime logic of dreams, which makes them hard to describe but wonderfully unsettling to read.”—Lisa Tuttle

“In Springdale Town evokes the physical paranoia about the surfaces of places and people popularized by David Lynch [and] the surreal punch-drunk madness of Flann O’Brien . . . Most of all, however, it places the fantastic in the foreground of our own motel-mall milieu . . . [But] there’s no quiet acceptance of the fantastical here. Wexler’s control of his prose, the careful delineation between characters, the ease with dialogue . . . the precise description of the setting, are all in the service of a sudden, sharp shock, a bizarre interface within the real world.”—Jeff VanderMeer