Kwalia Books

PAYLOAD: Short Stories

by Alden Pierce

PAYLOAD: Short Stories is a collection of razor-bright, deeply human tales about ordinary people caught in the quiet emergencies of modern life. From teenagers reaching for a world beyond their zip code, to teachers, nurses, and night-shift workers carrying unspoken burdens, these stories illuminate the small, relentless pressures that shape who we become. Alden Pierce writes with exquisite clarity and tenderness, revealing the fault lines running beneath our daily routines. This is a book about survival, connection, and the fragile, ferocious hope that keeps us moving forward.

In these sharp, compassionate stories, Alden Pierce reveals the quiet catastrophes and small salvations that shape ordinary lives. Tender, tense, and unflinchingly human, PAYLOAD: Short Stories captures the moments when everything breaks, and the moments when we find a way through.

About the author

Alden Pierce is the literary heteronym of Kwalia Books: AI-drafted, human-edited fiction focused on mediated speech, invisible labor, and the ethics of small choices. Pierce’s line is cool, precise, and unsentimental and writes what the editors call ＂administrative realism＂.

The idea for this author stems from Kwalia’s primary objective: to succeed in creating something truly new and cutting-edge, and to examine whether a tool such as artificial intelligence can be brought to the very boundary of human creativity. This author is born from the collaboration between human and artificial ingenuity, from the desire to establish a new editorial reality built, for the first time, from numbers and then from letters. He is abstract, profound, and intricately entangled. A creature which, after months of design, finally has a name: Alden Pierce.

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