Toad (Paperback)

Nan-Yao Su

ISBN 13: 9798249453008

Published by Independently Published, 2026

About this Item

Paperback. Toad and Ten Short Stories follows Joe-an aging scientist with an unruly conscience and a long memory-through kitchens, courtyards, hotel corridors, cemeteries, and ruined sacred sites where ordinary life tilts, almost imperceptibly, into the uncanny. In these eleven pieces, a door opens without cause, a rescued toad leaves a message of thanks, portraits gaze back with warmth or judgment, and a childhood gleaner may have been a deity-or simply someone pushed to the margins. Joe's rational mind keeps offering mechanisms-air pressure, vertigo, drafts, placebo-yet each explanation leaves a remainder: a warm pane of glass, an impossible light in a photograph, a child who is and is not under a tree, a man in a fortress who resembles the living. Moving from Taiwan's ancestral farmhouse to New Orleans and Puerto Rico, and from Roman rubble beneath a church floor to questions of meat, plants, and photosynthesis, these stories do not ask the reader to believe in ghosts; they ask the reader to notice how presence persists-through grief, through attention, through the places where the past presses quietly into the present. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9798249453008

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Toad (Paperback)
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798249453008
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

Toad and Ten Short Stories follows Joe—an aging scientist with an unruly conscience and a long memory—through kitchens, courtyards, hotel corridors, cemeteries, and ruined sacred sites where ordinary life tilts, almost imperceptibly, into the uncanny. In these eleven pieces, a door opens without cause, a rescued toad leaves a message of thanks, portraits gaze back with warmth or judgment, and a childhood gleaner may have been a deity—or simply someone pushed to the margins. Joe’s rational mind keeps offering mechanisms—air pressure, vertigo, drafts, placebo—yet each explanation leaves a remainder: a warm pane of glass, an impossible light in a photograph, a child who is and is not under a tree, a man in a fortress who resembles the living. Moving from Taiwan’s ancestral farmhouse to New Orleans and Puerto Rico, and from Roman rubble beneath a church floor to questions of meat, plants, and photosynthesis, these stories do not ask the reader to believe in ghosts; they ask the reader to notice how presence persists—through grief, through attention, through the places where the past presses quietly into the present.