Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
In this disarming story collection, a pet architect jeopardizes her relationship with her wife over a wild bird, a cement mixer helps a woman fulfill her dreams, a former model becomes a cult leader through social media, and a young woman searches for freedom and goes on a crime spree thanks to a basement full of $35,000 in coins. The characters in these funny and strange stories are populated by weirdos and misfits trying out new ways of being in the world.
Dina Del Bucchia is the author of three poetry collections. This is her first work of fiction.
"A confident collection of 15 witty, tightly crafted tales of theft, artisanal doghouses, and funeral crashing ... This is an exhilarating fiction debut." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A large part of the success of this book comes from Del Bucchia's willness to realize the full potential -- however outlandish -- of her often-quirky premises ... Del Bucchia holds real situations and emotions up to a funhouse mirror, and the world is shown to be both sillier and sadder than we expected." —Quill and Quire (starred review)
"Do not tell Dina Del Bucchia what to do, because she already knows what to do. Comedy like this only comes from an enormously rich mind, from a pounding heart, from bold and fearless guts. Reading this collection is like listening to an orchestra that knows all your secrets. Percussive and beautiful and sweepingly human, I'll be thinking about this book for the rest of my life." —Gabe Liedman, writer and actor
"With her poet's instinct for imagery, irony and scathing comedy, Dina Del Bucchia captures the melancholy and quirky profundity of contemporary life. These stories are a sly intervention at just the right moment, a canny diagnosis of, and much-needed salve for, the modern condition's lonely ache." —Nancy Lee, author of The Age
"Dina Del Bucchia writes that fictional line that divides tragedy and comedy, a line that is always thinner and more permeable than we think, and that is also unrelentingly, achingly human." —Jen Sookfong Lee, author of The Conjoined
Dina Del Bucchia: Dina Del Bucchia is the author of the poetry collections Coping with Emotions and Otters, Blind Items, and Rom Com, written with her Can't Lit podcast co-host Daniel Zomparelli. She is an editor of Poetry is Dead magazine and is the Artistic Director of the Real Vancouver Writers' Series. Don’t Tell Me What to Do is her first work of fiction.