Tatvan : A Short Story Collection

Fourteen stories. Fourteen experiments in what a short story can be.

TATVAN is a wide-ranging collection of literary fiction that refuses to settle into a single genre, voice, setting, or mode of storytelling. Moving from surreal fable and speculative fiction to dark comedy, travel narrative, social satire, science fiction, absurdism, and the frankly unclassifiable, these stories treat fiction as a laboratory for language, perspective, character, and form.

The collection opens with The Constanta Suite: Three Films for Puppets, a trio of strange, theatrical narratives told through radically different voices, and proceeds through worlds populated by immortal widows, robot dwarfs wandering the remains of civilization, eccentric scientists and interdimensional misadventures, cab drivers navigating the nocturnal underworld of American cities, travelers far from home, and characters whose perspectives transform the worlds they describe.

Just as varied are the forms themselves. Some stories unfold through conventional first-person narration; others borrow from screenplays, monologues, episodic television, travel writing, speculative world-building, and fragmented or digressive prose. Voices shift from lyrical to colloquial, philosophical to comic, intimate to grotesque. A story may begin in recognizable reality and drift toward the fantastic—or start somewhere completely impossible and proceed as though nothing could be more ordinary.

What unites them is a fascination with the possibilities of voice: with how differently the world appears when language, consciousness, culture, circumstance, and imagination are allowed to reshape it.

Originally appearing across literary journals and anthologies including The Dalhousie Review, Fourteen Hills, The Capilano Review, Eleven Eleven, Otoliths, and New Plains Review, the stories gathered in TATVAN showcase fiction deliberately unconstrained by a house style. “The Amarylis Sluys” was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

For readers drawn to adventurous literary fiction, experimental storytelling, unusual voices, dark humor, speculative imagination, and the pleasure of never quite knowing what the next story will be, TATVAN offers not one fictional world, but many—and a different way of telling a story each time.