Novels
One title
Austin City Limit
An Australian arrives in Austin for a music festival, misses it, and spends a week in a city that operates by its own rules. A washateria with unusual services, a Great Dane, a cave system, and Leonard Cohen. Ordinary things happen. None of them are ordinary.
19,837 words · 2 hr read · ISBN 979-8-9939828-0-9
Available on BiblioBoard · Indie Texas
Short stories
Seven titles
Escape from Bula, OH
Trapped in a brutal, frozen Ohio, two people are running out of time. When their bid for freedom stalls, they discover the desolate white landscape is not as empty as they think. An unexpected lifeline appears. Survival means choosing between loyalty and a flight into the pale north.
3,160 words · 20 min read
Second place, Nine-Banded Armadillo Prize in Fiction · Read the judge’s praise
Available on BiblioBoard · Indie Texas
Landfill
A bad date at the movies plunges a weary couple into a vast wasteland. Stuck in a rut, the two partners navigate an inescapable routine.
3,150 words · 20 min read
A Move to Australia
When an Australian couple moves to the U.S, their relocation stipend yields a hoard of unused kitchen gadgets. But when an unexpected egg needs incubating, an air fryer becomes a makeshift cradle. A tender, quirky story of unconventional parenthood, improvised survival, and protecting new life against the wild.
2,450 words · 15 min read
A Flutter of Moths
A light has flickered on the balcony of K-301 for weeks. At three in the morning Cara crosses the courtyard in her pink tracksuit to say something about it. The old woman upstairs has the kettle on.
2,612 words · 15 min read
A Paradiddle
The 97th Annual Leadership Workshop, a Hampton Inn conference room that smells of wet fur, and a facilitator with a hot seat. Everyone is asked to be vulnerable.
3,984 words · 25 min read
A Minute of Our Time
A woman in a Houston townhouse gives a persistent young man in a white short-sleeved shirt what he asked for: a minute. Tortilla soup is involved.
1,210 words · 7 min read
The Daftest Idea Two Slav Attorneys Ever Heard
A greyhound’s last week, a house sinking into Melbourne clay, and an arrangement both family lawyers call the daftest idea they’ve ever heard.
1,310 words · 8 min read
Monolith
An old lift in Mexico City, a liftman in his eighties, a stranger in apple-green Crocs. The ride keeps overshooting its floor.
600 words · 4 min read
What a wonderful style this writer has—quick, terse, surprising, open to the surreal, to a sense of urgency, to great wit. The most dramatic parts of this story—the escape, the destination—seem somehow productively to live in the background. It’s the immediate, often absurd present that dominates here, a present characterized by kaleidoscopic events, by the impossible, by the workings of an agitated mind. There’s so much to admire here, particularly this writer’s ability to let his story unfold slowly, fascinatingly.
Kevin Prufer, prize judge2026 Texas Poet Laureate · long-listed for the Pulitzer PrizeOn Escape from Bula, OH · Second place, Nine-Banded Armadillo Prize in Fiction · Grackle and Grackle