The Registry of Forgotten Objects: Stories

Winner, 2025 Society of Midland Authors Award in Adult Fiction In this haunting debut collection, best-selling author Miles Harvey probes the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects. In one story, an artist discovers an uncanny ability to transform modern sculptures into priceless ancient treasures. In another, a teenager experiences visions of other people's pasts while vandalizing their abandoned houses. In a third, a grieving couple returns again and again to the beach where their son disappeared, pulling plastic bottles, fishing nets, buoys, and other bits of beach trash from the surf "as if those random bits of wreckage were the untranslated hieroglyphs of some secret language that might help them understand their loss." Harvey--whose work Dave Eggers called "ludicrously unputdownable"--delivers a constellation of stories that explore the gravitational pull of material things: how they drift into and out of our hands, how they assume new meanings, and the ways they serve as conduits between the present and past, the everyday and incomprehensible. Most of all, he explores how these objects have the power to reveal strange and moving facets of the human condition.

Author: Miles Harvey
Publisher: Mad Creek Books
Published: 08/15/2024
Pages: 200
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.43h x 5.35w x 0.55d
ISBN13: 9780814259146
ISBN10: 0814259146
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Literary
- Fiction | Short Stories (single author)
- Fiction | World Literature | American | 21st Century

About the Author
Miles Harvey is the author of The King of Confidence (a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice selection), Painter in a Savage Land, and The Island of Lost Maps. He teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he chairs the Department of English and is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books, a nonprofit, social-justice publisher. The Registry of Forgotten Objects is his first work of fiction.