Boundless Deep, and Other Stories (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction)

Longlisted for the 2024 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story
​Named a Public Picks 2023 by Public Books

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Boundless Deep, and Other Stories is a portrait of a family that holds together despite everything. By turns introspective, surreal, and bitingly funny, this collection of linked short stories spans seven decades across Japan and the United States and shows the tenacity of relationships fractured by language and distance.

At the funeral of her old boss, a grandmother confronts the legacy of the draft letters she delivered as a girl during World War II. Facing the loss of his job, a father becomes the caricature strangers have always believed him to be. A graduate student living far from home is worn down by the reality of what it takes to save even a small piece of the world. Along the way, we meet communist revolutionary Shigenobu Fusako hiding out in a Tokyo hotel, submariner and war criminal Nishina Sekio in his tortured dreams, and Edwin, a half-dolphin friend, wreaking havoc in a public pool. Written in the compressed style of Amy Hempel and Lucia Berlin, these stories examine characters whose struggles submerge them, weighing them down from every angle, until they can finally float free.

Gen Del Raye is a translator, fiction writer, and poet and was trained as an oceanographer. He was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan, and lives in Minneapolis. His writing has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Best Small Fictions 2017, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. He is the winner of the Force Majeure Flash Contest, Up North Poetry Prize, and Great Midwest Poetry Contest and was awarded a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship.