In this provocative debut collection, Oliver Zarandi introduces a new hybrid genre perhaps best defined as ‘tender body horror’, in which frank and naturalistic explorations of familial, romantic and sexual relationships are juxtaposed with characters who bleed incessantly, or live in other people’s bodies, or eat furniture, or casually conspire with their lovers to kill families and animals alike. Soft Fruit in the Sun couches modern truths in darkly-comic parables that bite like unseen teeth. By turns funny and absurd and quietly grotesque, as affecting as they are razor-sharp, Zarandi’s stories play out in a universe both like and unlike ours. A world where grief, eroticism, poverty, body image, toxic masculinity, mental illness, and the inherently dysfunctional dynamic between people all recur—steeped in dream logic and cut through with a dry, ironic wit. Lovers of Lydia Davis, Carmen Maria Machado, and the strangeness of Dino Buzzati and Roland Topor will devour Soft Fruit in the Sun like manna.