Unless There’s Anything Else is a collection of 13 short stories, totaling about 30,000 words (130 pages). The stories, unified by overlapping characters and settings, combine dry humor with emotional depth to explore the grief that often swims just below the surface of everyday life.

 

Divided into three thematically distinct sections, the stories range in style from traditional literary fiction to magical realism. Formal variations include an epistolary story, a dialogue-only piece, and two metafictional stories.

 

The centerpiece of the collection, “Downstream Benefits,” was nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. In 2025, it won the Maine Literary Award for Short Fiction and was listed as a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories. Also included in the collection is “The Projectionist,” a flash piece nominated for Best of the Net in 2024.

 

Other stories include “Splice” (Epiphany), in which a squabble with an author reveals a book editor’s hidden grief; “Mr. Palm Beach” (Pithead Chapel), in which a father returns from the grave and wears out his welcome; and “Concession” (Audience Askew), in which a teenage cinema worker in the 1990s must choose between a seductive friendship and doing the right thing.

 

For its deadpan humor and bittersweet portrayals of ordinary life, the collection is comparable to J. Robert Lennon’s Let Me Think and Joshua Ferris’s The Dinner Party and Other Stories. It would also appeal to readers of George Saunders, Lorrie Moore, and T. C. Boyle for its playful voice and blend of strangeness and warmth.