Shadows and Clouds

Stories that question our experience of time, truth, and memory.   Through the stories in Shadows and Clouds, Marcus Stewart invites us to consider how things are not always as they appear or as we remember them, instead locating reality in the imagination and the dream world. While animals understand the world without words, humans create our experiences as stories, translating past and future into tales told in the present. Stewart's stories take the notion of storytelling and expand to a consideration of how truth, misremembering, logic, lying, and uncertainty play together to affect our experience of reality. In an alternate reading of time, Stewart poses the suggestion that you may already have a future memory of reading this book, and reading the stories backward may bring us back to the present. Shadows and Clouds is the winner of the 2021 Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Chapbook / Novelette Contest, chosen by Theodora Ziolkowski.