Bad Thoughts: Stories

An exhilarating and delightfully deviant debut story collection that, with comedic precision and compulsive irreverence, explores the most surreal and inadmissible fantasies of contemporary women.

"Nada Alic's Bad Thoughts is lit up with the perception, wit, and cunning of Miranda July and Sally Rooney." --T. Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

Nada Alic's women--the perverts, nobodies, reality TV stars, poetic hopefuls, shameless party girls, and self-help addicts of Los Angeles and its environs--are all wrestling with a shared stark reality: the modern world. To cope, they live in their baddest thoughts: the lush, strange landscape of female make-believe.

In "Earth to Lydia," a support group meets to enjoy earthly pleasures after achieving "too much enlightenment," engaging in bizarre exercises that escalate to a point of violence and fear. The narrator of "Ghost Baby"--the spirit of a proto-child assigned to a couple whose chemistry is waning--writhes in disembodied frustration as its parents fail to conceive it. In "Daddy's Girl," the daughter of Eastern European immigrants tries to connect to her distant and difficult father through the invention of increasingly elaborate home maintenance repairs. And in "The Intruder," a lonely woman's break-in fantasy quickly builds to a full-blown obsession, until she finds an unwitting partner with whom to act it out.

Though each of Alic's characters thrive and ache in different circumstances, they all grapple with the most painful equations of modern life: love, trust, power, loneliness, desire, violation, and vengeance. And she conjures them all with a voice that is instantly arresting, unexpectedly hilarious, and absolutely unforgettable.

A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

Author: Nada Alic
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 07/12/2022
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.20w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780593466636
ISBN10: 0593466632
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Short Stories (single author)
- Fiction | Humorous | Black Humor
- Fiction | Women

About the Author
NADA ALIC is the author of Bad Thoughts and a forthcoming novel. Her story "The Intruder" was shortlisted for the CBC Short Fiction Prize 2019, "My New Life" was published in No Tokens Journal. She lives in Los Angeles.