Now available for pre-order
Runner Up, Acacia Fiction Prize
Runner Up, BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize
Finalist, Katherine Anne Porter Prize
Finalist, Iron Horse First Book Prize
In this absurd and wildly inventive debut collection, Emily Greenberg imagines the inner lives of the politicians, celebrities, artists, and entertainers who have ushered in our post-truth era.
With equal parts compassion and incisiveness, Greenberg vividly renders the porous boundaries between fact and fiction, public and private, reality and simulation. George W. Bush almost tells Jay Leno the truth about his paintings. Kellyanne Conway lands a punch. Hawaii’s governor enjoys a transcendent experience with a sentient Twitter bird amid a disastrous false missile alert. And in the final story, Paris Hilton falls from a helicopter onto Thomas Pynchon’s fire escape, leading to a surreal adventure full of magical dentists, talking dogs, and unexpected friendships.
Satirical and deadly serious, clever and tender, Alternative Facts forges new spaces for meaning and connection across our fractured realities.
Emily Greenberg’s writing has appeared in the Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Big Fiction, Santa Monica Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, New Stories from the Midwest, and elsewhere. Her writing honors include the Witness Literary Award in Fiction and two Pushcart Prize Special Mentions. She holds an MFA from the Ohio State University and lives in San Diego.
Cover design by Raúl Lázaro
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advance praise
“These fictionalizations investigate their real-world counterparts with a surprising amount of humanity and complexity, and the prose reveals the author’s attention to craft . . . A bold and often eerie set of tales that skillfully explore life’s what-if complexities.” —Kirkus Reviews
“These are stories that will stay with you. Maybe because of how absurd, yet somehow believable they are. Maybe because of their unconventional formats, or because of the intensity of diving so deeply and so compassionately into the intimate and personal inner worlds of these flawed and complex characters.” —Independent Book Review
“Super smart, skewed, resonant and risky in the best possible ways, the fictions in Emily Greenberg’s Alternative Facts explore the nexus where the problem called history collides with the problems called perspective, language, and narrativity. Stand back: an exhilarating, kinetic new talent is in the house.” —Lance Olsen, author of Absolute Away and My Red Heaven
“The pleasures of reading Greenberg’s stories are multitudinous and mind-boggling. There is wonder and exhilaration and hilarity, surprise—astonishment—at every turn, and such beautiful, persuasive strangeness throughout that one feels the world has gone atilt. These stories are disturbing, wildly thrilling, sometimes scary, fun. (Perhaps this is how it feels to ride a mechanical bull—if the bull had heart and was also very, very smart?) Alternative Facts offers a glorious simulacrum of life. All great fiction does this, of course—but Emily Greenberg has done double (triple, quadruple, octuple) duty by building her narratives upon what we think we already know. So buckle in and get ready to be thrown.” —Michelle Herman, author of Close-Up and Dog
“Smart, funny, insightful. These stories make me want to find the mind that made them, burrow inside, and feast for days on a world that’s strangely familiar but just skewed enough to show me where I come from. And possibly where I belong. A poised and exciting debut.” —John Haskell, author of The Complete Ballet and American Purgatorio
“A fact is a thing done. A fiction is a thing made. And the fact is that Emily Greenberg has done made a fabulous fabrication of stereoptic and stereophonic stories collected in Alternative Facts. Greenberg constructs a contemporary Edith Hamiltonian mythology, concocting shared off-the-shelf cultural narratives out of holy holey whole cloth, steeping them in the frayed omnipresent miasmic memes of our everyday evidentiary electromagnetic stew. These stories are savvy, canny recombinant recipes of the possible, probable, and problematic times and spaces where we find ourselves residing and resigned. Brilliantly constructed deconstructions, these mad made things mix it up with the empirical imperative, tango and two-step backwards and in heels, only to spell out how easily our senses are foiled and fooled. Alternative Facts maps the facts of our resignation (sign and signifier) to a reality of now knowing unknowable knowns.” —Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone
book tour - save the dates!
EAST COAST LAUNCH
January 28, 2025 @ time TBA
WORD, 126 Franklin St, Brooklyn, NY 11222
January 30, 2025 @ 6 pm
Booked, 8511 Germantown Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19118
February 1, 2025 @ time TBA
Belmont Books, 79 Leonard St, Belmont, MA 02478
SOUTHERN LAUNCH
February 6, 2025 @ 6 pm
Novel, 387 Perkins Ext, Memphis, TN 38117
Info | RSVP on Facebook
February 16, 2025 @ time TBA
The Pop-Hop Books & Print, 5002 York Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90042
Plus, more events to be announced!
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