Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments

A celebration of the infinite ways in which stories can be told, challenged, imagined, and subverted. From a fragmented ransom note to hanging footnotes, a contemporary fairy tale to coded text, intersecting pieces of flash fiction about driving to a backwards story about gradual blindness, a listicle about challenging corporate culture to how-to guides for performing wokeness, a Chicago intersection with eight separate destinies to an impossible dating application, Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments is an exploration of not just mixed-race/hapa identity in Michigan (and the American Midwest), but also a triumphant affirmation of the world we live in, the people we love, the worlds we imagined, and the people we should have been with. Purchase your copy here & Jackson will love you forever.

Publication Date: 1 October 2021

Blurbs

“Jackson Bliss, human kaleidoscope, sees, absorbs, considers, changes, plays with, and creates characters and situations that absolutely ring with aliveness. This writer's insatiable appetite for the world and all we do in it transforms into gorgeous sentences and playful/serious inquiry here. A book of inspiring vitality and perception.”

—AIMEE BENDER, author of The Butterfly Lampshade

“A thrilling switchback roller coaster of a collection - by turns magical and absurd, nerdy and punk, soulful and furious. Read it/ride it - you’ll have your hands in the air, your heart in your mouth, the wind in your hair!”

—PETER HO DAVIES, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

“This beautiful collection! Here are stories that challenge form, that attack the status quo, that ask urgent questions about love and identity and meaning and demand we sit up and pay attention to our answers. I left Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments renewed and inspired. Jackson Bliss’s boundary-pushing collection is an exquisite reminder that fiction, when written with this much heart and courage, can expand our understanding of what it means to be alive. You need to read this book.”

—JULIE BUNTIN, author of Marlena

“There's an incredibly powerful attractive force waiting for you in every Jackson Bliss story, an irresistible magnetism powered by his energetic and welcoming voice, by his mathematical structural precision, by the wit and joy and justice that propel his fiction. This is one of the most inviting and innovative collections I've read, an endlessly compelling source of righteous adventure and wonder."

—MATT BELL, author of Appleseed

“Read this book for its endless invention, its vibrancy and intelligence, its urgency, its velocity, its enormous heart and troubled soul. Read this book for the aching poignancy of the lists, and all that is invested in that gesture.  Read it for the way Jackson Bliss moves through the fleeting, fugitive, baffling world searching for the ballast and the deep consolation only fiction of the highest order attempts to find.”

—CAROLE MASO, author of Defiance and The Art Lover

"Energized and energizing, Jackson Bliss’s Counterfactual Love Stories posits fusion and confusion as problem and possibility, from race, gender, and wealth inequality to genre, form, and perspective, all with an eye toward exploring how we might make meaning(s) out of our illegible, hyperbolic now. Every sentence is a surprising and sometimes vulnerable, sometimes satiric bite, data-dense as a shockwave ride through some video game committed to showing us what five minutes into our future will look like.” 

—LANCE OLSEN, author of My Red Heaven and Skin Elegies

“Jackson Bliss sends the whole mixed-race, mixed-ability world spinning in these stories. Lucky for us, he has just the right besotted dream language to share his visions and just the right koans to satisfy our need for mystery. Counterfactual Loves Stories & Other Experiments is funny, provocative, and soulful—it’s a wild ride and you should climb onboard. "

—VALERIE SAYERS, author of Brain Fever and The Powers

“Of course the cover color of Jackson Bliss’s epochal collection for the anthropocene, Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, is fetching Coral. This book is made up of storied and honeycombed restless ramparts and multi-chambered reefs of intricate interlocking organic masonry, both delicate and enduring. Don’t let the title fool you. These are shifting and shifty fictions, artfully articulated cantilevers levered and buttresses flying.  These are walls of sound in the wakes of spectacular wrecks!  Here is the geological poetry of ice age glaciers gliding on their own tectonic melting.”

—MICHAEL MARTONE, author of The Complete Writing of Art Smith and The Moon Over Wapakoneta

“It’s supra-fun to hang out with Jackson Bliss’s brain.  These stories play and provoke, reminding us that fiction can nudge the world and that the world needs a nudge.”

—REBECCA SCHIFF, author of The Bed Moved

“Jackson Bliss may have invented a new genre of fiction, call it hapa fiction. In this collection of genre-crossing stories, a Norwegian woman and Japanese man meet in a glass museum and give birth to a demi-god glass blower. Gangs of tweens fight for racial justice on the streets of Grand Rapids. A lawyer vapes as she gazes longingly at the skyline of Tokyo while mixed-race kids left alone in Chicago compose songs from the notes blown by tugboats on the river. The realism in these stories is magical and Bliss makes the wonder that infuses them breezy as a jazz riff in a late-night Tokyo lounge. Or maybe it’s Chicago."

 —STEVE TOMASULA, author of Once Human: Stories

Reviews

"Jackson Bliss' experimental love stories are experimental because they must be, because the lives of his mixed-race, marginalized characters are, for the most part, unheard, unsung. To the Midwest canon, Bliss has added not simply literature but a nuanced counterfactual history."

—Cleveland Review of Books

"Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments is Jackson's first book and is as fine an introduction to his ecstatic and heartbreaking work as I can imagine."

—Los Angeles Review of Books

"Jackson Bliss's debut book of fiction, Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments is exactly what the title claims—a collection of exciting, bold experiments that stretch the notion of what a story can be. Of the thirteen stories in it, no two share the same form. Yet underneath the narrative invention, the genre-bending fireworks, and the speculative characters, Bliss's stories are meditations on classic themes: time, autonomy, race, and, of course, love."

—ZYZZYVA

"Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments unsettles the way we know the world, or the conditions of knowledge which render the world stable, reliable, and predictable ... [a] background in music and composition shapes the musicality of Bliss' prose bringing electric neon to classical shape and form."

—Chicago Review of Books

"Among the much-deserved, sky-high praise for Jackson Bliss's brand-new short fiction collection . . . this [book] is indeed kaleidoscopic: wild and vivid at one turn, astute and contemplative the next, these are stories you tumble inside, bright portals to compelling people and places and circumstances that, like love itself, feel both universal and wholly unique."

—Juked

Buzz

—Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments is a fiction bestseller for December & January, Small Press Distribution, 1 February 2022

—Book Review for Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments in the Cleveland Review of Books, 26 January 2022

—Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments is a fiction bestseller for October & November, Small Press Distribution, 1 December 2021

—Interview in Los Angeles Review of Books with Bryan Hurt about Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, 14 November 2021

—Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments included in Alta’s California Book Club for November, 2 November 2021

—Book Review for Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments in Heavy Feather Review, 9 November 2021

—Interview in No Contact with Gauraa Shekhar about Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, 26 October 2021

—Interview in ZYZZYVA with Peter Schlachte about Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, 22 October 2021

—Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments included in New Pages Book Stand as a “New & Noteworthy” book for October, 20 October 2021.

—Book Review for Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments in the Chicago Review of Books, 14 October 2021

—Interview in Juked with Ashley Farmer about Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, 10 October 2021

—Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments ranked #2 in Amazon Hot Releases, 7 October 2021

—Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments is a Book of the Month at Vol. 1 Brooklyn, 5 October 2021

—Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments mentioned in BlazeVox, 26 September 2021

—Book Review for Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments reposted in Discover Nikkei, 12 Sept 2021

—Book Review for Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments in BG Independent News, 11 November 2020