Hiding Out

By Jonathan Messinger
Illustrated by Rob Funderburk

Check out what the press has had to say. They can be trusted!

On Sale Now! Nothing is as it seems: A jilted lover dons robot armor to win back the heart of an ex-girlfriend; an angel loots the home of a single father; a teenager finds the key to everlasting life in a video game. In this much-anticipated debut, one of Chicago’s most exciting young writers has crafted playful and empathic tales of misguided lonely hearts. Sparkling with humor and showcasing an array of styles, Hiding Out features characters dodging consequences while trying desperately to connect.

Read excerpts here.

There’s such freshness, naturalness, humor and charm to Jonathan Messinger’s stories—an overall sense of immediacy that planted me in present—that only in retrospect did I realize how in HIDING OUT, Messinger had also subtly constructed a personal and original world.—Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago and I Sailed With Magellan

Look here. Jonathan Messinger is that guy. That guy whose stories made me come out of blurb retirement to write one more. The stories in this book are beautiful and simple and funny and true. You should not want more from a story than you will find in here.—Elizabeth Crane, author of You Must Be This Happy to Enter and When the Messenger is Hot

Hiding Out touches softly (and often painfully) on the intimacies and embarrassments of usually ordinary lives, revealing the way these lives open briefly into extraordinary gestures. Add to that slight cracks in the surface of reality and you have a phalanx of stories that weave their way through reality by simultaneously staring in at the hidden tender heart of things and gazing out at the fantastic always lurking beyond the real. An impressive debut.—Brian Evenson, author of The Wavering Knife and The Open Curtain.