The Sea Beast Takes a Lover — Michael Andreasen

Dazzling and delightful, with its feet only slightly tethered to the world we know, THE SEA BEAST TAKES A LOVER explores family, faith, and longing through a kaleidoscope of surreal landscapes and spellbinding characters.

Andreasen's stories unfold in wildly inventive worlds that invite the supernatural into our familiar routines: in “Bodies in Space,” an extramarital affair is rudely interrupted by an alien abduction, while in “Blunderbuss,” a third-grade class takes an ill-advised field trip to a floundering time travel institute. “Jenny” follows a reluctant caretaker's attempts to manage his kind-hearted headless sister, and in the title story, a group of sailors find their ship commandeered by an aggressively lovestruck kraken.

Romping through the fantastic with bighearted ease, these stories uncover a universal yearning for connection in seldom-explored spaces, revealing that aliens can help us think about loss, that time travel is just another way to talk about guilt, and that sea monsters may have a thing or two to teach us about love.

With a captivating new voice from an immensely talented storyteller, THE SEA BEAST TAKES A LOVER uses the odd, the extraordinary, and the miraculous to expose us at our most profoundly and hilariously human.