Livingston Press

July 19, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-60489-347-2

Order: Livingston Press, Barnes and Noble, Amazon

Reviews

“Shaw’s tales range from dark surrealism to offbeat comedy. The prose is uniformly tight and clever… Readers will be reminded of the work of George Saunders, though Shaw’s stories have a weirder, less reassuring tone. He veers from familiar to alien or alien to familiar in a way that keeps his audience from ever growing too comfortable, fostering a propulsive sense of unease that carries the reader on to the next strange episode.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Many people today are thirsty for that connection, to learn how we fit into an increasingly strange landscape that doesn’t always feel like it has a place for us. All We Could Have Been and More reflects this anxiety like a funhouse mirror, distorting it through a lens of ant funguses and body snatchers and other twisted things that are still oddly relatable. All along the way it’s told with the black humor of people who have learned that laughing at the darkness is the best—and maybe only—way to keep it at bay.” — After Happy Hour

“Hilarious and heartbreaking, All We Could Have Been and More is the kind of collection that makes you laugh in public. Shaw is a master of clever premises drawn from surprising sources. His characters embody D&D adventurers, video game fighters, crash test dummies, B-horror movie monsters, Hallmark Christmas hunks. From the detritus of our pop-culture guilty pleasures, Josh crafts characters stuck in the loops of their absurdly cruel worlds, yet their earnest desires to connect and find love humanize each story’s luminous core. To say this book is funny sells it short. These stories are as inventive as they are compassionate.” — Dustin Hoffman, author of No Good for Digging and One-Hundred-Knuckle Fist

“Joshua Shaw‘s stories are as charming and funny as they are whimsical and generous, but you know how that goes. They’re unnerving. Table-turners. Switch-flippers. How they know more than they say and say more than they have any right to know. The characters? Liar-poets who crack wise. Profound romantics with threadbare souls. You know the type. Out-of-place, out-of-sorts sorts who bring their work home with them and can’t get out of their own heads. I haven’t even mentioned the meet-cutes, the cul-de-sacs, the tete-a-tetes. This book’s full of it.” — Tom Noyes, author of Behold Faith and The Substance of Things Hoped For