Can't Get Home

Can't Get Home

the debut story collection from Natureza Gabriel, stuns out of the gates. Gabriel strides across history, across genre, inhabiting an array of imaginative terrain with lyricism and force. We meet an Odysseus who excoriates all audiences who have not lost everything. A cardiac surgeon encounters a San Bushman in an attempt to figure out why his uber-successful friend’s hearts are all failing. An emotions scientist will stop at nothing to draw forth the latent sadness in a resilient colony of Green monkeys. Elon Musk, having arrived on Mars, discovers that he has accidentally left part of himself on earth. An aging docent at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History discovers he is the inadvertent curator of an ossuary. Mark Zuckerberg drifts through a post-apocalyptic metaverse, murdering rogue programmers by sucking their innards out through a giant straw.

With surgical deftness, Gabriel inhabits the makers of the modern world, the authors of our contemporary landscape of alienation. Thrumming with the yearning for home, these are fictions that strain against all of the ways we have been exiled from our deepest selves.

This is a pre-order. Fulfillment begins November 2024.