Destroy All Monsters and Other Stories (Paperback or Softback)

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Greg Hrbek’s Destroy All Monsters, and Other Stories is a collection that explores what it means to be human—and inhuman. These ten stories have won an array of honors—and whether set in the historical past or in a speculative future, each is wildly imaginative and shockingly real.


In “Sagittarius,” selected for The Best American Short Stories, a mother and father search a dark forest for their missing newborn, who is either a child with profound birth defects or a miraculous creature. In “False Positive,” a ghostly girl visits her biological father ten years after being aborted in utero. In “Bereavement,” a marriage is falling apart following a child’s accidental death, but a combination of myth and technology provides hope for a second life. Fantastic, horrific, painfully familiar, these stories are the work of a consummate storyteller.

Greg Hrbek is the author of The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly, which won the James Jones First Novel Award. His short stories have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Conjunctions, and Black Warrior Review and have been short-listed for the O. Henry Prize and the Bridport Prize. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.