Being your best, most authentic self can be a somewhat grievous process. The winner of a beauty pageant bursts into flames the moment she is crowned. A man enters a dream and re-encounters a former lover in Pyongyang, North Korea. A gaggle of hipsters catches news of a secret Bon Iver concert playing somewhere on Dempsey Hill, only to risk the survival of their friendship.

Daryl Qilin Yam’s long-awaited first collection of short fiction combines magical realism, speculative autobiography and ekphrasis to weave illusory figures out of gung-ho millennials and the well-meaning mentor figures who fail them, and unveils the strange quests queer folk must embark on in order to keep a hold on love.