How We Know Our Time Travelers

Overview

How We Know Our Time Travelers: Stories, is a dark, intellectual, and surreal collection inspired by the uncertainty of time that explores themes of technology, climate change, reality, love and loss. Atmospheric, speculative stories examine our post-pandemic reality and future. Anita Felicelli introduces readers to a bickering couple who use an app to track their fights in “Keeping Score,” a woman who learns that an unseen lodger is in her home in “A Minor Disturbance,” a group of creepy friends who sell jars of fog in “The Fog Catchers,” and a woman who encounters a younger version of her own husband at her art exhibition in the title story. Time travel, as the book envisions it, happens all the time, if not in the way we’re used to considering it. Unsettling, uncanny, cerebral and genre-bending, the book reminds us of the fragility and unreliability of memory, and its invisible impact on the larger moments of our lives.

Reviews

“Stunning” —Foreword Reviews, starred review

“Felicelli’s shimmering fantastical collection...explores environmental devastation, desire, and memory... Each story is transportive, no matter how bleak the subject matter. Readers will delight in Felicelli’s off-kilter vision.” —Publishers Weekly

“Darkly glimmering short fictions… Filled with engaging characters navigating their increasingly strange worlds, the stories are by turns winsome and unsettling.” —Kirkus Reviews

Author Biography

Anita Felicelli is the author of Chimerica: A Novel and the award-winning Love Songs for a Lost Continent. She edits Alta Journal‘s California Book Club. Her short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Midnight Breakfast, Air/Light, The Normal School, Kweli Journal, and elsewhere. She has contributed essays and literary criticism to the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Alta Journal, Slate, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times (Modern Love), among other places. Her short stories and poems have been anthologized and in 2023, one of her short stories was performed as part of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts. She served on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle from 2021-2024. Felicelli grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her family in Mountain View, CA.