Travel to Southeast Asia on wings of the fantastic for Jason Erik Lundberg's debut short-story collection Red Dot Irreal. There you'll meet pirates and shamans, wise fish and mystical storytellers, living monuments and paper animals, time travelers and civet cats, stone taxi drivers, floating dental patients, and a sentient bird park. Once you enter the surreal worlds of Lundberg's equatorial fantastika, a part of you will never leave. Advance Praise: "Stories exotic, spicy, and redolent as a four-star curry. A fine meal for the mind awaits you in Lundberg's collection." Jonathan Carroll, author of Outside the Dog Museum "Lundberg's writing is that of an Old Soul who views the world through Young Eyes; his work is jamais vu of the highest order: these stories are memories encountered for the first time, but never to be forgotten once they've been experienced." James A. Owen, author and illustrator of Here, There Be Dragons "Red Dot Irreal is a box made of the finest equatorial wood, containing a collection of genuine gems of the early 21st century noble art of fantastika." Zoran Zivkovic, author of The Last Book "Red Dot Irreal teems with imagination, location, originality, and fine writing." Jeffrey Ford, author of The Empire of Ice Cream
Author
Jason Erik Lundberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, and has lived in Singapore since 2007. His latest publications are his first novel (and 25th book), A Fickle and Restless Weapon (2020), a related novella, Diary of One Who Disappeared (2019, recipient of a 2013 Creation Grant from Singapore's National Arts Council), and a "greatest hits" short fiction collection, Most Excellent and Lamentable: Selected Stories (2019). He is also the author of many books for adults—including Red Dot Irreal (2011), The Alchemy of Happiness (2012), Strange Mammals (2013), and Embracing the Strange (2013); books for children—the six-book Bo Bo and Cha Cha picture book series (2012–2015) and Carol the Coral (2016); and more than a hundred short stories, articles, and book reviews. His writing has been translated into half a dozen languages, and seen publication in venues such as Mānoa, the Raleigh News & Observer, Farrago’s Wainscot, Hot Metal Bridge, Strange Horizons, Subterranean Magazine, The Third Alternative, Electric Velocipede, and many other places. His work has also been shortlisted for the SLF Fountain Award, Brenda L. Smart Award for Short Fiction, SCBWI Crystal Kite Member Choice Award, and POPULAR Readers’ Choice Award; he was honourably mentioned twice in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Lundberg has been the fiction editor at Epigram Books since 2012, where he jump-started the publisher's fiction line; many of the books he's edited since have won multiple national awards, and made various year’s best lists. He has also served as a prose mentor with Singapore's Creative Arts Programme and Ceriph Mentorship Programme. In addition, he is the founding editor of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction (2012–2018), series editor for the biennial Best New Singaporean Short Stories anthology series (est. 2013), editor of Fish Eats Lion Redux (2022) and Fish Eats Lion (2012), and co-editor of A Field Guide to Surreal Botany (2008) and Scattered, Covered, Smothered (2004). From 2005–2008, he facilitated an occasional podcast called Lies and Little Deaths: A Virtual Anthology. An active member in PEN America and a 2002 graduate of the prestigious Clarion Writers Workshop, Lundberg holds a Master's degree in creative writing from North Carolina State University, and was a 2023 International Writer-in-Residence at the Toji Cultural Foundation Residency Program in South Korea.
