Everything Abridged: Stories

"Incredibly entertaining and so damn illuminating" (Entertainment Weekly), Dennard Dayle's electrifying and wholly original collection of satirical stories create a bitingly funny portrait of American racism, capitalism, and politics.

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year

"Slyly defiant and blazingly imaginative . . . Dayle's a genre-shattering writer, whose wit and intellect never cease to entertain." --New York Times bestselling author Paul Beatty

Framed as a reference work of humorous "entries" that offer trenchant social commentary, Everything Abridged presages a dark vision of the near future but tells jokes in the face of it: An intelligence agency operative uncovers a conspiracy to generate conspiracies and realizes his participation in the scheme. A Caribbean monarch meets four decades of American presidents and adjusts his country's foreign policy accordingly. Experiment participants are asked to bring back a gun as quickly as possible. A copywriter on a space colony advertises a weapon with the potential to destroy his home during an intergalactic war.

These and other linked stories, many of which feature a speculative bent--about being Black in America, law enforcement practices in an android society, Olympic speed walking, consumerism, nuclear war, and more--are interspersed with hilarious, one-line definitions for words ranging from abolition to zygote, creating a sharply humorous portrait of American inequality.

With his singular wit, sharp prose, and shrewd observations, Dennard Dayle captures the struggles his characters face to keep hold of their sanity in a society collapsing into chaos and absurdity.

Author: Dennard Dayle
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Published: 04/11/2023
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.27h x 5.51w x 0.71d
ISBN13: 9781419760976
ISBN10: 1419760971
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Satire
- Fiction | Short Stories (single author)
- Fiction | African American & Black | General

About the Author
Dennard Dayle is a Jamaican-American writer from New York City. He is a graduate of Princeton University and received his MFA from Columbia University. His short fiction has been published by TheNew Yorker, Clarkesworld, Matchbook, the Hard Times, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and his satirical performance art has been covered by NBC, the New York Post, and New York magazine. Dayle is based in Brooklyn. Everything Abridged is his debut collection.