Motion Sickness

Abstract

In this collection of stories from Toledo-based writer Alex McCullough, young adulthood and all its various joys and sorrows are rendered with equal measures humor and poignancy. In one story, a young woman and her sister confront their father at a dinner party celebrating his engagement to his second wife. In another, a sheltered boy and his charismatic new neighbor conspire to cross the Canadian border, with disastrous aftermath. In another, a young woman, failing out of her prestigious university, struggles through a torturous Thanksgiving dinner with her extended family. In another, a dysregulated young man yearns for metamorphosis as the anniversary of a past trauma looms in the near future. The narrators of these seven stories are all at a crossroads. They face unrequited love, disillusionment, self-destructive habits, crippling nostalgia, conflicts of identity and sense of place, familial strife, and the perennial quandary: how do we possibly navigate these delicate years? How do we ever make it out the other side?