James R. Gapinski w/ Carolyn Abram, THE MUSEUM OF FUTURE MISTAKES

James R. Gapinski visits the store for their collection of stories, The Museum of Future Mistakes. Through these and other fabulist and magical realist stories, Gapinski considers our physical relationship with our own bodies, how we process love and loss, and the fragility of identity amid moments of personal crisis. They're joined by writer, editor, and teacher, Carolyn Abram.

Gruesome scenarios take a tender turn; beautiful moments become sources of derision. Winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, The Museum of Future Mistakes is packed with inventive narrative choices and sharp lyricism, upending expectations on every page.

In “Brother and Not-Brother,” the residents of an entire city transform into perfect copies of the narrator’s deceased brother; these uncanny doppelgängers spark meditations on childhood scars, grief taking root within the body, and how painful memories can bloom into joy, laughter, and love. In “The Last Dinosaurs of Portland,” two anthropomorphic dinosaurs yearn for companionship and empathy while fighting for a meager existence under the weight of past traumas. In “Three-Month Autopsy,” a character visits ex-lovers and returns Ziploc baggies full of their body parts, exploring infatuation, jealousy, regret, and the contours of both giving and receiving within a relationship.

With elements of the grotesque and the surreal, fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Kelly Link will find much to admire in this award-winning collection.

James R. Gapinski (they/them) is the author of three chapbooks and the novella Edge of the Known Bus Line, which was listed as one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2018. Their short fiction has appeared in the Best Microfiction 2023 anthology, Heavy Feather Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Variant Literature, and elsewhere. The Museum of Future Mistakes, winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, is their first full-length short story collection. James is managing editor of Conium Press in Portland, Oregon and teaches fiction for Southern New Hampshire University's online MFA program.

Carolyn Abram (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer, editor, and teacher whose work focuses on the intersection of technology and everyday life. Her fiction has been nominated for Best of the Net awards, as well as shortlisted for Uncharted Magazine’s Novel Excerpt prize. Her nonfiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Business Insider, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She is also the author of all eight editions of Facebook for Dummies. She is currently a guest editor for The Citron Review. She teaches classes at Seattle’s Hugo House, including the annually beloved Workshop for Weirdos.

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