Crowd-Pleaser: Stories

Crowd-Pleaser: Stories is a collection of short stories that is conceptually interested in the rhetorical dynamics between observers and the observed. Across the genres of absurdism, dystopia, and satire, and under the aesthetic umbrella of postmodernism, these stories ask readers to consider how they perceive others under varying contexts. How do we perceive lives displayed in museums versus visitors at those museums? How do we perceive a wild polar bear versus a polar bear in a glass enclosure? A principal focus across this collection is deconstructing the societal norms that enable people and systems to mine particular lives for educational or entertainment value. These stories are also concerned with space and its commodification. Each story is interested in the spaces that are not obviously commodified but might eventually be as capitalism runs out of free space to consume. Some of these new spaces include private aspects of the body, the grave, and the afterlife, among others. Though extreme and fantastic, the commodification of the afterlife only humorously realizes a realist trend of insatiable corporatization. These stories are heavily influenced by authors such as Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, George Saunders, Aimee Bender, and Kelly Link. The stories in this collection, like the authors listed above, mix and subvert various genres to defamiliarize our complacent, uninterrogated understandings of the systems we ignorantly uphold.