Bad Thoughts
Stories
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
An exhilarating and delightfully deviant debut story collection that, with comedic precision and compulsive irreverence, explores the most surreal and inadmissible fantasies of contemporary women.
“Nada Alic’s Bad Thoughts is lit up with the perception, wit, and cunning of Miranda July and Sally Rooney.” —T. Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
Nada Alic's women—the perverts, nobodies, reality TV stars, poetic hopefuls, shameless party girls, and self-help addicts of Los Angeles and its environs—are all wrestling with a shared stark reality: the modern world. To cope, they live in their baddest thoughts: the lush, strange landscape of female make-believe.
In “Earth to Lydia,” a support group meets to enjoy earthly pleasures after achieving "too much enlightenment," engaging in bizarre exercises that escalate to a point of violence and fear. The narrator of "Ghost Baby"—the spirit of a proto-child assigned to a couple whose chemistry is waning—writhes in disembodied frustration as its parents fail to conceive it. In “Daddy's Girl,” the daughter of Eastern European immigrants tries to connect to her distant and difficult father through the invention of increasingly elaborate home maintenance repairs. And in “The Intruder,” a lonely woman’s break-in fantasy quickly builds to a full-blown obsession, until she finds an unwitting partner with whom to act it out.
Though each of Alic’s characters thrive and ache in different circumstances, they all grapple with the most painful equations of modern life: love, trust, power, loneliness, desire, violation, and vengeance. And she conjures them all with a voice that is instantly arresting, unexpectedly hilarious, and absolutely unforgettable.
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Alic's candid and humorous debut collection, women explore their darkest thoughts and fears. The narrator in "My New Life" reflects on her alienation at a baby shower ("I sometimes worry that motherhood is contagious, like a parasite or the way cohabitating women synchronize their cycles"). There, she finds a kindred spirit in Mona, who sets up a dating profile despite being married. In "Tug Spin Release," the narrator, a gym teacher, attends a bachelorette party in Cabo, where she holds out for an unlikely acceptance from a writing residency. In Cabo, she feels increasingly isolated from the others as they overshare about their lives. In "The Party," the narrator and her boyfriend take a quiz from a swank bedding company before selecting their pricey sheets, and face their ambivalence over whether they want children. Later, afraid she's having a dangerous reaction to an ecstasy pill, the narrator calls a telehealth line and confides in the doctor about her life, a "conga line of disappointments" in which she's "getting less young and more old at the same time." As the characters wrestle with what's missing from their lives, the author finds mordant hilarity. The more Alic leans into the weirdness, the more addictive this becomes.
