Vague Predictions
& Prophecies
CLASH Books, August 2024
Named one of Electric Literature’s “Most Exciting Debut Story Collections of 2024”
A couple employs exact clones of their partners, but then slowly begin losing their memories. Four boys with cruel intentions come across a field of statuesque women, unaware of the vengeance that awaits them. Paranoia leads a brilliant engineer into creating a language-processing machine that will tell her the truth of others' emotions.
Vague Predictions & Prophecies explores the myriad ways in which desire structures (and destroys) the self, language, and love, questioning the very nature of human connection. Through beautifully written prose, Shen invokes the surreal to create gigantic worlds packed inside deceptively small packages, emphasizing a resounding truth: that our fractured understandings of each other may yet be enough.
Advance Praise
“Daisuke Shen’s stories are strange, funny, beautiful, and terrifying. Characters include tortured lovers, migrants, zombies, video games, teenagers practicing a debauchery of sadness, and different versions of God, all serving as witnesses in a cross-examination of human nature.
Vague Predictions & Prophecies is a constant play of styles, genres, the frontiers between nightmares and reality, and the power of silence. The marvelous thing about these stories is that they use the reader’s own blank spaces to convey horror not as an extraordinary occurrence, but as a portrait of everyday life.”
YURI HERRERA, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World and Ten Planets
“Confessions of sexbot addicts, confessions of divination addicts, mighty marvels fighting, further rabbit god incarnations, cosmological parables that gust inverted the umbrella of your epistemology — Shen's stories are literary NDEs where worlds dissolve and shift but the rock-steady sadness does not. Vague Predictions & Prophecies is a sensitive, risky, and brilliant collection of dazzles engineered to wink out of a profound and dark terrain.”
EUGENE LIM, author of Dear Cyborgs and Search History
“Women stand like scarecrows in a pasture outside of town; boys tip them over like cows. Archangel Gabriel slams his head into a wall, over and over again. A single orange geranium peeks out from underneath snow. And right in front of everybody, a mother begins to eat her hand on the train. In Daisuke Shen’s Vague Predictions & Prophecies, transformations are violent/painful, passion is revenge/playful, and the world can end anytime — but love is forever. An inspiring debut — so alive and full – Daisuke Shen’s a genius.”
ASHLEIGH BRYANT PHILLIPS, author of Sleepovers
“Daisuke Shen is the best and smartest talent working in the short long form today. Shen’s characters satisfy both expected and eccentric, terrestrial and astrological, humanoid and primal demands…Shen’s stories capture their suffering, distress, oddity, madness, futility, dejection, love, and misery with depths of empathy, sharp honesty, and clear foreshadowing. These stories ooze with nail polish, sandpaper, with horseradish roots. Vague Predictions & Prophecies is a rice cake on fire.”
VI KHI NAO, author of The Italy Letters and Suicide: the Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche
"Addictive, elegant and juicy…These stories feel limitless and buzzing. They move coolly between time, culture and literary form, exploring the triviality of it all. Shen’s writing is sweet and eerie; their characters strange and ordinary, on the edge of miracle or violence. Vague Predictions & Prophecies perfectly captures Shen’s talent and versatility as a writer — I’m sitting on the edge of my seat for more."
JAMIE MARINA LAU, author of Gunk Baby and Pink Mountain on Locust Island
“With a strangeness and risk so refreshing it recalls the best of Kelly Link’s short fiction, or the ghosts of Alice Munro and Ryu Murakami commingling in an expanse of broken promises to late capital’s rush for incorporation, Daisuke Shen’s stories beg us to maintain a visceral attachment to absurdity as the only true contestant against the lackluster psychic domination of the real”
JOSEPH EARL THOMAS, author of Sink and God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer
“Daisuke Shen’s Vague Predictions & Prophecies are stories that carve themselves into your bones, tapping into some primal energy that is both completely relatable yet singularly strange. Their way of writing about the world is so big-hearted, so fucked up, so tender and also so brutal.”
JULIET ESCORIA, author of You Are the Snake and Juliet the Maniac
“A dazzling, surreal debut short story collection, Vague Predictions and Prophecies reads like an indrawn breath. Each story is sprawling and languid, crumbling the barriers between the real and the imagined. An angel falls in love with a cosmic other and is banished from heaven. Long-distance partners shack up with cyborg copies of each other, then start to lose their memories. Teenage bullies find a field full of hypnotized women, tip them like cows, and are eaten alive. Shen’s writing is a narrative compulsion, drawing you ever deeper into worlds you didn’t know you wanted to inhabit. Hypnotic, disturbing, breathtaking. I've never read anything like it.”
FOUNTAIN BOOKSTORE, Richmond VA
Interviews
In Conversation with Ali Raz - 128 Lit
In Conversation with Emma Burger - Write or Die Magazine
In Conversation with Parker Young - Full Stop Magazine, forthcoming
In Conversation with Rebecca Gransden - X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine
In Conversation with Chi Siegel - Sine Theta Magazine
In Conversation with James Jacob Hatfield - Gemini Sessions
Reviews
Jess Alexander for Full Stop Magazine
Charlie Marks for Southern Bookseller Review
Violet James McMaster for Vi the Librarian
Tracy Ann Thompson for California Reading
Excerpts
“The Pasture” - Cleveland Review of Books. Edited by Zach Peckham