Shadows and Clouds

Author: Marcus Stewart

Publisher: Omnidawn Publishing (2023)

Through the stories in Shadows and Clouds, Marcus Stewart invites us to consider how things are not always as they appear or as we remember them, instead locating reality in the imagination and the dream world. While animals understand the world without words, humans create our experiences as stories, translating past and future into tales told in the present. Stewart's stories take the notion of storytelling and expand to a consideration of how truth, misremembering, logic, lying, and uncertainty play together to affect our experience of reality. In an alternate reading of time, Stewart poses the suggestion that you may already have a future memory of reading this book, and reading the stories backward may bring us back to the present.

"In these exquisitely bizarre stories, Stewart presents a kaleidoscopic vision of what it means to control or to be controlled, showing us how the very forces that appear to help us may threaten to undo everything that we are. These are stories that probe the intersections between domesticity and technology, that pull at the threads of simulation and dream, and that question the very nature of desire in worlds where one's needs are as impossible to unpuzzle as they are to sate."

—Theodora Ziolkowski