The Reincarnations

"Fast-moving and deeply felt stories, sharply envisioned and lit with humor and compassion. Nathan Elias writes like he's lived a thousand lives."
— Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying

“Nathan Elias’s fearless debut collection is a genre defying labyrinth of loss and heartache. From machines that might let you talk to the dead to pills that will make you fall out of love, these deft stories signal a tremendous talent in capturing what it means to be human in this or other realities.”
— Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone

"Nathan Elias writes about the world—both as we know it and as we hadn’t yet thought to imagine it—through a singular, deeply compassionate, lens, showing us both its monstrousness and its beauty. The stories in this collection are steeped in loss and grief, but they’re also suffused with hope, with love, with the possibilities of transformation, of flight. After finishing The Reincarnations, I felt transformed, myself."
— Gayle Brandeis, author of Many Restless Concerns

These loosely connected stories are laced with the familiar and the uncanny, the real and the surreal, the ordinary and the fabulistic. A documentary filmmaker refuses to give up on finding his daughter who mysteriously disappears by the river. A small-time real estate agent recovers from a brief psychotic episode upon discovering his fiancée’s affair. An actress struggles to grasp reality when the recordings of lucid dreams are used in movies instead of live performances. An eccentric teenager recounts his first romance
from beyond the grave. Spanning the boundaries of literary and speculative fiction, The Reincarnations revolves around multiple forms of Zen-like rebirth. Equal parts raw emotion and wild imagination, Nathan Elias’s debut story collection ushers in an electrifying yet tender new voice in fiction.