Allegra Hyde's debut story collection, Of This New World, offers a menagerie of utopias: real, imagined, and lost. Starting with the Garden of Eden and ending in a Mars colony, the stories wrestle with conflicts of idealism and practicality, communal ambition and individual kink. Stories jump between genres—from historical fiction to science fiction, realism to fabulism—but all ask those fundamental human questions: What do we do when we lose our utopia? What will we do to get it back?
Over the course of twelve stories, Hyde writes with a mix of lyricism, humor, and masterful detail. A group of environmental missionaries seeks to start an ideal eco-society on an island in the Bahamas, only to unwittingly tyrannize the local inhabitants and disrupt the social ecosystem. The neglected daughter of a floundering hippie commune must adjust to conventional life with her ungroovy grandmother. A wounded veteran gets lost in erotic fantasies of his twin brother's life. Haunted by her years at a collegiate idyll, a young woman eulogizes a friendship. After indenturing his only son to the Shakers, an antebellum vegan turns to Louisa May Alcott's famous family for help. And in the final story, a down-and-out drug addict gets a second chance at life in a government-sponsored space population program, only to be flummoxed by erectile dysfunction. An unmissable?debut, the collection charts the worlds born in our dreams and bred in hope.
