Eternal Night at the Nature Museum

Loss and rediscovery occupy the heart of this adventurous collection. The characters in Eternal Night at the Nature Museum find refuge in strange, repurposed spaces: a middle-aged addict emcees a demolition derby, which transforms into a hostel, then a cult; a church congregates in an abandoned Hardee's; octogenarians escape their nursing home; unsupervised children sell knives to the neighborhood. In a contemporary America blemished with loneliness and late-capitalism, there is no end to the fractured places in which these characters find 'home.' In twenty vivid, rowdy, buoyant stories--ranging from one-page flashes to thirty-page odysseys--Barton assembles a collection of unforgettable safe havens perfect for crashing, even if only for a night.

Tyler Barton is a literary advocate and cofounder of Fear No Lit, home of the Submerging Writer Fellowship. His fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, and elsewhere. He's earned honors from Kenyon Review, The Chicago Review of Books, Pheobe Journal, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction 2020 and Best Small Fictions 2020. His collection of flash fiction, The Quiet Part Loud, was published by Split Lip Press in 2019. He lives in Lancaster, PA. Find him at tsbarton.com or @goftyler.