Undiscovered Territories

“Bizarre, sometimes whimsical, often nightmarish, the stories of Robert Freeman Wexler possess the sublime logic of dreams, which makes them hard to describe but wonderfully unsettling to read.”—Lisa Tuttle

No one charts the borderland between dreams and reality, between the everyday and the fantastic, quite like Robert Freeman Wexler. This career-spanning collection of his shorter work—which includes the much-acclaimed novella “In Springfield Town” as well as new, previously unpublished stories—confirms Jeff VanderMeer’s assessment of Wexler as the leading exponent of “North American Surrealism.”

“Wexler’s prose is surreal, slippery, and always surprising.”—Kelly Link

“Emotionally and stylistically complex literary fairy tales . . . reminiscent of Jonathan Swift or Jorge Luis Borges, and in all ways fantastic.”—Steve Rasnic Tem

"[Wexler] places the fantastic in the foreground of our own motel-mall milieu . . . , [but] there’s no quiet acceptance of the fantastical here. Wexler’s control of his prose, the careful delineation between characters, the ease with dialogue, the purposeful pacing, the precise description of the setting, are all in the service of a sudden, sharp shock, a bizarre interface within the real world. Don’t call it North American Magic Realism — call it North American Surrealism." — Jeff VanderMeer