About the book

Spend enough time reading the dictionary and you might begin to notice a strange phenomenon: thousands of oddly conspicuous italicized sentences, all of which read like tiny pieces of fiction that got lost and wandered into the wrong book. Dictionary Stories: Short Fictions and Other Findings is a collection of very short stories, each composed entirely of these curious excerpts, otherwise known as example sentences. 

Organised alphabetically by theme from the everyday (dating, family, jealousy, memory) to the extraordinary (the apocalypse, fantasies, murder, the occult), and illustrated in glorious technicolour black and yellow, Dictionary Stories is a giddy celebration of the wild, elastic potential of language. Noir thrillers, fantasy epics, love stories, horror stories, eulogies, recipes, and drawing room murder mysteries—each one a miniature literary remix of unlikely parts hidden in plain sight, created by flipping through the dictionary and knowing where to stop.

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