Our Dreams Might Align

by Dana Diehl

Overview

Two brothers, swallowed by a whale, lament the loneliness they suffer in the belly of the beast. A man is transformed into a beam of light; another travels through time whenever he falls asleep. Teenage girls prepare for an indistinct apocalypse; a schoolboy dissolves into a throng of toads; and intimate relationships are twisted out of shape by plagues of worms, by parasites, by the presence of mindbending, inhuman forces.

Across sixteen remarkable stories, Dana Diehl wanders the dreamscapes that unfold from those moments when everyday lives are warped by otherworldly experiences. Her journeys lead to places where the fabric of reality has frayed — where familiar things take on unsettling new meanings and menacing energies gather strength beyond the limits of the visible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781999974114
Publisher:	Splice
Publication date:	04/16/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	134
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Dana Diehl is a graduate of the Susquehanna University Writers Institute and earned her MFA in Fiction at Arizona State University. She lives in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.

Table of Contents

• We Know More
• Astronauts
• Burn
• Swallowed
• Swarm
• Animal Skin
• Closer
• Stones
• Another Time
• To Date a Time Traveler
• The Mother
• A Place Without Floors
• Once He Was a Man
• The Boy Who Turns Into Toads
• Girls Prepare for the Apocalypse
• Going Mean

Editorial Reviews

Dana Diehl’s stories are pure obsession-fuelled magic, each one an engine of possibility powered by Diehl’s intense curiosity, her love of knowledge, her limitless imagination. Our Dreams Might Align is a map disguised as a book of stories, come with humor and heart to lead us back to somewhere like the best days of childhood, a world almost unbearably alive with mystery and wonder.

— Matt Bell, author of Scrapper

Words pile on in fragile rhythms. Sentences are constructed out of negative space. The unsaid lingers. Fragments dominate. Each story exists only for a short time, breaking off suddenly. An atmosphere of absence seeps into each one, the fear of being left behind.

— Augusto Corvalan, The Masters Review

Dana Diehl is a scientist. Her stories run the gamut of scientific inquiry: biology, ecology, zoology, anatomy, astronomy and geology all make cameos in Our Dreams Might Align. Whether through worms or wormholes, Diehl’s characters are experimenting, as is she. … [But often] what starts with a wry wink ends with a gut punch. Diehl’s stories may roam the stars and delve into the microcosms all around us, but they always land in the human heart.

— Rachel Richardson, Necessary Fiction

In her remarkable stories, Dana Diehl releases a new language for sadness and wonder. As I read, a robin flew through my temporal lobe. Each tale left me wanting another. In a world in which our existence is threatened, she plays Scheherazade, bringing us through dark nights.

— Catherine Zobal Dent, author of Unfinished Stories of Girls

Diehl’s stories take us to a variety of worlds and situations… linked together in a delicate way.

— Eshani Surya, Heavy Feather Review

Diehl’s breathtaking stories explore both the natural world and the human heart with a scientist’s passionate inquiry and a poet’s exquisite precision. Our Dreams Might Align is a gorgeous début collection that illuminates deep oceans and deep space, the amorous bite of a cobra rattler, and our profound desire to love and be loved.

— Tara Ison, author of Ball

In Dana Diehl’s début collection, a dazzling panoply of characters takes risks and makes choices in a more-than-humanly scaled universe. With poetic exactitude and exceptional scientific vision, Diehl brilliantly evokes geologic time, the migration of whales, space exploration, post-prison life, baby Komodo dragons, snakes and the subtle laws of physics, arranging these, helix-like, around a human instinct for hope, illumined, and sometimes faulted, by love.

— Melissa Pritchard, author of A Solemn Pleasure

From the Publisher