This Fear We Harbor

Publication Date: MARCH 10, 2027

In This Fear We Harbor, a new flash fiction collection by Tommy Dean, we’re invited into those moments before and after a rupture, a violence, a cleaving away from the safety of locked doors, gated communities, and wedding vows. The characters in these stories are hungry for life, solace, safety, and escape from the thousands of ways that we cut, scrape, and injure ourselves and others. In prose that sparkles and soars, Dean finds the surprises in everyday encounters, shifting us away from the expected and toward the resonant. These stories smolder and burn until they explode, leaving the reader searching past the ghostly images toward the truth of how we live today. This is a book about the aftermath of our decisions, our attempts to be as human as we can, our fight for something promised to us, and our connection to who we were supposed to be all along.

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HOLLOWS

In Hollows, Tommy Dean reveals the crawlspaces and attics of American families, the places we dread and the places we yearn for—moments we didn’t know we needed until they were already lost. These fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers, wives, and best friends crack and bend under the pressure of conventional love, running away and toward one another, longing for a space to call home, often giving in to the hollow securities of their lives. In these forty-five flash fictions, you’ll find the last two people on Earth, wondering if love or ramen will keep them alive; two brothers racing the Y2K clock as they consider their fear for the future; a son convincing his father to abandon a decrepit house that has come to represent the old man’s stubbornness. These stories thrum with the electricity of wonder, challenged by the open wounds of love and guilt—for parents, for loved ones, for broken selves surviving among their desires to strike out in a world that threatens to harden them into desperate creatures. Dean’s clear and urgent prose unites reader and character as they wind down dark and uncertain paths toward the fading light.

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COVENANTS

Brutal and gorgeous, Tommy Dean’s chapbook Covenants contemplates the end of the world in various scenarios—floods, droughts, imminent divorce. These stories are tiny, piercing thorns. Even as everything is breaking, characters admire the beauty in the wreckage: “she loved the way the dying sunlight filtered through the spiderwebbed cracks.” Covenants both mourns and celebrates the illumination that forces through those cracks.

―Kim Magowan, author of Undoing

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SPECIAL LIKE THE PEOPLE ON TV

Special Like the People on TV is fiction with a touch of too much reality. These brief stories–episodes, really, in the life of diverse, and in some cases, desperate characters–rings true in a way that’s not unlike the dramas airing on TV. These stories are not reality, they’re better. As the credits roll up the page, you will be wondering, musing, and predicting what happens next.

(Out of Print)