Winner of the 2016 John Simmons Short Fiction Award Allegra Hyde’s dazzling debut story collection, Of This New World, offers a menagerie of utopias: real, imagined, and lost. Starting with the Garden of Eden and ending in a Mars colony, the stories wrestle with conflicts of idealism and practicality, communal ambition and individual kink. Stories jump between genres—from historical fiction to science fiction—but all ask that fundamental human question: is paradise really so impossible? Throughout OF THIS NEW WORLD, Hyde writes with a mix of lyricism, humor, and masterful detail. A group of environmental missionaries seeks to start an ideal eco-society on an island in The Bahamas, only to unwittingly tyrannize the local inhabitants. The neglected daughter of a floundering hippie commune must adjust to conventional life with her ungroovy grandmother. Haunted by her years at a collegiate idyll, a young woman eulogizes a friendship. After indenturing his only son to the Shakers, an antebellum vegan turns to Louisa May Alcott’s famous family for help. And in the final story, a former drug addict chases a second chance at life in a government-sponsored space population program. An unmissable debut, the collection charts the worlds born in our dreams and bred in hope.
Author
Allegra Hyde is the author of the story collection THE LAST CATASTROPHE, which was named an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times. Her debut novel ELEUTHERIA was named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker and shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize. Her first story collection, OF THIS NEW WORLD, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. A recipient of four Pushcart Prizes, Hyde's writing has also been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Her stories, essays, and humor pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, American Short Fiction, BOMB, and many other venues. For more about Allegra, visit www.allegrahyde.com Or check out her blog, The Simile Museum
