Join Daisuke Shen, Liza St. James, Bud Smith, and Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim at McNally Jackson Seaport's bar for an evening of fiction and poetry in celebration of Shen's Vague Predictions & Prophecies.

About Vague Predictions & Prophecies: a debut collection of stories from author Daisuke Shen, wherein divine beings and humans alike must rely on omens to navigate the unpredictable lives they find themselves inhabiting. A couple employs exact clones of their partners, but then slowly begin losing their memories. Four boys with cruel intentions come across a field of statuesque women, unaware of the vengeance that awaits them. Paranoia leads a brilliant engineer into creating a language-processing machine that will tell her the truth of others' emotions. Vague Predictions & Prophecies explores the myriad ways in which desire structures (and destroys) the self, language, and love, questioning the very nature of human connection. Through beautifully written prose, Shen invokes the surreal to create gigantic worlds packed inside deceptively small packages, emphasizing a resounding truth: that our fractured understandings of each other may yet be enough.

"Daisuke Shen is the best and smartest talent working in the short long form today. Shen’s characters satisfy both expected and eccentric, terrestrial and astrological, humanoid and primal demands. Sharp in pungency and volatile like soy nuts in their composition, Shen’s recklessly unforgettable characters are wasabi-like in their delivery and psyche-stimulating in their inventions. Shen’s stories capture their suffering, distress, oddity, madness, futility, dejection, love, and misery with depths of empathy, sharp honesty, and clear foreshadowing. These stories ooze with nail polish, sandpaper, with horseradish roots. Vague Predictions & Prophecies is a rice cake on fire." —Vi Khi Nao, author of War is Not My Mother 

"Confessions of sexbot addicts, confessions of divination addicts, mighty marvels fighting, further rabbit god incarnations, cosmological parables that gust inverted the umbrella of your epistemology—Shen's stories are literary NDEs where worlds dissolve and shift but the rock-steady sadness does not. Vague Predictions & Prophecies is a sensitive, risky, and brilliant collection of dazzles engineered to wink out of a profound and dark terrain." —Eugene Lim, author of Dear Cyborgs and Search History

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Daisuke Shen is the author of the short story collection Vague Predictions and Prophecies (CLASH Books 2024), as well as the novella Funeral co-authored with Vi Khi Nao (KERNPUNKT Press 2023). They live in New York City. 

 

 

Liza St. James is a contributing editor at BOMB, a senior editor at the literary annual NOON, and a writing fellow in the School of Art at Cooper Union. She is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction.

 

 

 

Bud Smith is the author of the novel Teenager (Vintage ‘22). His short fiction has been published in the Paris Review, the Baffler, Forever Magazine, and others.  

 

 

Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim’s poems have appeared in E-flux Magazine, the Poetry Project Newsletter, Apogee Journal, and Mizna. They are the author of the books Tel Aviv, Black Bedouin (with Tenaya Nasser), and most recently, BLK WTTGNSN.

 

 

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