David Boles

In October 1972, a seven-year-old boy in Nebraska sat on red shag carpeting in front of a wood-grain television console and absorbed the full commercial curriculum of Saturday morning. He did not know he was being trained. That is the central finding of this book.

Four disembodied cat heads drift through deep space in Life Helmets, searching for their missing bodies. A puppy head who has never had a body searches with them. The soup is stirring in the wrong direction. The quest continues. Whiskerfluff is the captain because someone has to be.

Nobody teaches you how to grieve. This is the strange truth at the center of an experience so common it touches every person who has ever lived long enough to lose someone.

A Fractional Fiction Novel. A freelance audio engineer in Columbus, Ohio, is hired to clone the voice of a county commissioner and fabricate a recording of a conversation that never took place.

Abandoned in Place is a work of cultural criticism that traces the pattern of institutional abandonment from the personal to the political. Beginning with the author's own childhood, the book identifies the grammar by which abandonment is disguised.

A boy stands in a bathroom and discovers his face can change. Asa Greer is five years old when the mirror shows him something that should be impossible: the features of the boy next door, worn on his own skull. The borrowed face lasts three seconds. The cost is permanent.

An Autopsy of Urban Collapse. In late September 2013, a road crew buried 150-year-old cobblestones under fresh asphalt on Baldwin Avenue in the Jersey City Heights. Something durable was concealed beneath something disposable, for the convenience of the least permanent users of the road.

Three teenage girls. Three disabilities. Three elemental powers. Elle is Deaf, navigating a hearing world through lip-reading and American Sign Language. Meen lost her sight at nine and rebuilds reality through sound and temperature.

At the Emain Institute, a private psychiatric facility on the Hudson River, Dr. Francis Morrow documents patients whose visions defy clinical explanation. Cesare speaks prophecies in his sleep. Deirdre sees her own death in multiple versions, each ending different, none of them false.

Robert was a garbage man before the system made such work obsolete. He spent decades watching what people threw away, learning the difference between what households claimed to value and what they actually discarded.

Who decides what a character is on the American stage? The playwright who created the character, or the institution that controls the production?

There is a sign on a wall at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, mounted above a narrow shelf. The sign bears the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, a text telephone that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone.

One year after going public, Elle, Meen, Teena, and Tal have become symbols in a national debate about powered individuals.

Three months after escaping the tunnels beneath New York City, Elle, Meen, and Teena find themselves under constant surveillance. Prometheus Applied Sciences hasn't forgotten them, and a new operative named Sarah Miller has infiltrated their lives as a volunteer at the group home.

Dr. Lena Vasquez sees something in the data that the statistics do not measure. A gravitational lensing researcher at the University of Chicago, Lena finds a periodic oscillation in the dark matter density profile of a candidate dark galaxy.

The light that touches your face right now left the sun eight minutes ago. You have never seen the present sun. No one has. Every act of writing shares this property. The moment a word is set down, it begins traveling away from the person who wrote it.

The title comes from "The Atomic Man," the seventh story in the collection, where a teenager named Calvin Reece understands what he has become. He has become light: the loneliest thing in the universe, touching everything, holding nothing. But the phrase describes all twelve protagonists.