How We Got Into This

Flooded cities, a fallout shelter, a backstage maze, an amnesiac forest: the stories in this collection take place on the boundary between the familiar and the strange. Their protagonists scavenge for traces of forgotten territories, often getting lost in the process. They also dig holes, venture into lands of the dead, steal plums, study sea creatures, and stumble off the end of a pier. Eerie, moody, and unpredictable, the stories in How We Got Into This chart our yearnings to unlearn the world.

Advance Praise for How We Got Into This

Michael Holt’s writing is beautiful and absorbing and spellbinding and rhythmically soothing, as if you were on a boat, sailing away into an ever-swelling mild apocalypse.

--Vi Khi Nao, author of The Italy Letters and Swimming With Dead Stars

An ethereal collection that feels at once pertinent to the supremely surreal dislocation of our current epoch (eco-catastrophe, generational warfare, global pandemics and all) and also unmoored from the constriction of chronology. The result are fictions that refuse to be categorized as either warning or elegy, but are both at the same time. Reader, take note, because the voices that are speaking in Holt’s trenchant tales are the ones that have come before us, the ones that will follow after us and, perhaps

most strikingly, they are our own.

--Sarah Blackman, author of Mother Box and Hex

A striking, unexpected, intimate portrayal of the strangeness of everyday life. In these stories you will find ways of living and ways of dying which, as you read on, become the natural course of things. How We Got Into This does what all good books do-it returns to us not only the lost, but also the never-experienced.

--Christina Tudor-Sideri, author of Schism Blue and Disembodied