Garrett Ashley

Garrett Ashley lived most of his life in Mississippi and at the beginning of the pandemic finished his Ph.D. at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers. His work has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, The Normal School, Sonora Review, Analog SF&F, DIAGRAM, Reed Magazine, and Sequestrum, among other places. His story collection Before the Snakes Came was recently a finalist for the 2022 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. He now lives in Alabama, where he teaches creative writing at Tuskegee University.

Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions
$17.95

by Garrett Ashley

Runner-Up, Press 53 Award for Short Fiction

Coming May 3, 2024

ISBN 978-1-950413-76-8

8.5 x 5.5 softcover, 172 pages

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Garrett Ashley’s debut short story collection, Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions, introduces a cast of characters both strange and strangely familiar: a father struggling to reconcile modern co-parenting with his past life as a yak, a brother and sister fighting to survive in an alligator-infested swamp, residents of a seaside town where the cadence of life and loss follows the heartbeat of the mythical Leviathan. Readers will find stories of reincarnation, zombification, and genetic modification—but most of all, a piercing self-awareness that invites us to laugh at the absurd while also reminding us, in all seriousness, that what some may call “fantasy” often tells the truest story.

Early Praise for
Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions

Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions is alive in every sense of the word: the writing is beautiful, the stories surprising and bright, and the pages are also crawling with creatures and our own wild, creaturely human selves.

—Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal and A Guide to Being Born

Rarely have I encountered an author capable of balancing the absurd and the heartfelt as Garrett Ashley. Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions plunges us into the depths of Ashley's vivid imagination, serving up conceits both fantastic and outrageous. Here can be found worlds where strange creatures live side by side with even stranger humans, and Ashley's best trick is humanizing his oddballs, seemingly with little sleight of hand. This is a thoroughly enjoyable and exciting debut, unflinching and unforgettable.

—Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze: Stories

Garrett Ashley has created a panorama of tales with Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions. This is a striking collection that shifts between worlds, from the creatures that inhabit the land and sea, to the two-legged humans who walk around troubled and confused, fighting to make sense of it all. These stories are a reminder that there is much beauty, and pain, in all creation.

—Michael Farris Smith, author of Salvage This World and Desperation Road

A fever-hot exhalation of wonder. In these stories, aquariums hold leviathans, amoeba people burst through fake human skins, bruises ache from past lives, and the dead return as pigs. Heady, blistering, and tender as a wound.

—Micah Dean Hicks, author of Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions is an intense read, it is teeming with life in so many forms: sea creatures (obviously) but also yak, pigs, reptiles, peacocks, snails, spiders, even single-celled organisms. Each story has its own strong voice, and in each story, Ashley manages to create a separate, memorable world. More often than not, the boundaries between human and animal life become permeable, if not invisible."

—Annette C. Boehm, author of The Apidictor Tapes