Short Story Collection
Best of the West Anthologies
Southwest Anthologies
Praise for On a NASA Flight to Heaven
"D. Seth Horton's wild flight through the borderlands will leave you reeling with its meta twists and ductile turns. A trip not for the faint of heart."
-José Skinner, Author of Flight and Other Stories and The Tombstone Race
“Horton’s meta/postmodern take on storytelling is once highly readable and formally inventive.”
-Aurelie Sheehan, Author of Once Into the Night and Demigods on Speedway
“In clean, needle-sharp prose, Horton takes the reader on a harrowing tour of the borderland of the American psyche, a surreal place where humor can change to horror in the blink of an eye. Spare, prickly and hallucinatory, like the desert itself, these stories pulse with a quiet menace. They stay with you like aborted dreams, all the more haunting and enchanting for slipping away with more to say.”
-James Terry, Author of Kingdom of the Sun and The Solitary Woman of Shakespeare
“D. Seth Horton’s On a NASA Flight to Heaven is an unpredictable ride, boasting copious amounts of intelligence, humor and narrative dexterity. Set along the borderlands of the United States and Mexico, these stories had me continually wondering about the ways lines are drawn and distinctions made—how much supposed opposites (e.g. political identities, the real and the fantastic, fiction and non-fiction) depend on each other for definition, how these borders blur once everything’s in motion. A fascinating, involving experience.”
-Peter Rock, Author of My Abandonment, The Unsettling, and Spells: A Novel Within Photographs
"In D. Seth Horton's On a Flight to Nasa, borders, physical and spiritual, are as illusory as heat waves on a desert highway. These speculative stories can be starkly realistic in Horton's insight into human nature, both the sublime and the horrific, but they're also magical in their flights into the surrealistic. With no concise borders, the stories begin and end in an ellipsis of thought that will keep you thinking and imagining long after you put the book down."
-Lucrecia Guerrero, author of Tree of Sighs and of On the Mad River
“Skirting the borderlands between countries, texts, genders, and rhetorics, D. Seth Horton erases the demarcations between memory and imagination, mystery and revelation, the familiar and the uncanny, in fictions that challenge, entertain, and madden the reader into grasping the ungraspable. On a NASA Flight to Heaven is original and delightfully astonishing.”
-Tracy Daugherty, author of Empire of the Dead, The Boy Orator, and Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme
"On a Nasa Flight to Heaven is a gripping, surprising, and innovative short story collection that pushes the boundaries of the form. But it's also much more than that. D. Seth Horton has written a sui generis book that creates an entirely new mode of storytelling to reflect and honor the dynamism and hybridity of the US/Mexico borderlands. This marks the debut of a major new voice in Southwestern literature."
-Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: Bookmarked
“This collection captures the complexity of the borderlands. By blurring the genres of fiction and non-fiction On a NASA Flight to Heaven dares us to question our perceptions of reality. Even a redwing blackbird, who divebombs the mansion, takes on a stunning tenor. Through unforgettable characters, richly and economically drawn, this collection is indeed a remarkable journey.”
-Charlotte Hilary Matthews, author of Green Stars, Still Enough to Be Dreaming, and Whistle What Can’t Be Said
“On a NASA Flight to Heaven is the work of an author-cartographer-mad scientist. The book is a smart, inventive experiment in what a story collection can be, and how the form can illuminate the shadowy spaces between fact and imagination, resolution and mystery, words and silences, the now and the possible.”
-Caitlin Horrocks, author of The Vexations, Life Among the Terranauts, and This Is Not Your City
“The stories within D. Seth Horton’s On a NASA Flight to Heaven, beyond their American-Mexican border settings, feature characters occupying other liminal spaces, caught in mid-transformation, in mid-transgression, in mid-confusion. Most of the collection’s stories begin and end in media res, allowing eerie glimpses of fraught and desperate lives. While many of the real world situations the collection examines – a cartel wedding, an intervention, a school shooting – are harrowing or brutal, Horton’s approach is empathetic, even generous, shaped by an admirable refusal to allow easy judgments or convenient resolutions. Blending genres and weaving truth with the mythic and apocryphal, Horton's storytelling is a mesmerizing dance between the known and unknown, a beautifully tangled exploration of humanity and its complexities. On a NASA Flight to Heaven is a thought-provoking tapestry of narratives that promises to intrigue and surprise.”
-John Tait, associate professor, University of North Texas
"D. Seth Horton's On a NASA Flight to Heaven delivers borderlands life as you've never seen it before, a wild metaphysical trip, all marked by spirited prose and startling inventiveness of form. A wonderfully original debut collection from a writer who not only knows the territory but is more than willing to take the narrative risks surely needed to conjure up its dreamlike deeper essence.”
-Peter LaSalle, author of Sleeping Mask: Fictions
“D. Seth Horton’s On a NASA Flight to Heaven is a collection full of puzzles, patterns and prestidigitations, but one where the writer’s hand is steady and the prose lush enough to not feel like a trick. Borges would have this book on his nightstand, or, rather, he’d have it be the one you tug from the shelf to unlock the secret stairwell that snakes down into the unknown.”
“Horton’s deft yet playful control (think Meow Wolf, in book form!) guides the reader through the bleeding borders of Texas and Mexico and beyond, to places where alligators turn into dogs, and birds turn into birds from a different story altogether. Immigration agents mingle with sicarios, families are torn apart then hastily patched back together, imaginary tomes are given a close critical read, and topography and taco wrappers become more important than you’d think. Taken as a whole, these stories venture beyond magical realism and into mesmerizing, delightful psychedelia.”
“Divested of their burdensome beginnings and endings, these tales stand stark naked before us to showcase the strength of their characters—dreamers and hopefuls who search for god inside wads of cash, rolls of fat, and bottles of booze. On a NASA Flight to Heaven dares to suggest the possibility of a future (border)land where disparate—and desperate—people might be thrown dangerously together, but where instead of sparking hostility, their proximity makes everyone just close enough to care.”
-Dina Guidubaldi, author of How Gone We Got
“What a weird, wonder-filled book D. Seth Horton has made, as weird and wondrous as the American Southwest these stories arise from. An amalgam of styles, histories, metas, myths, and make-believe, Horton’s fragmentary narratives form a whole that is frightening, funny, sad, and breathtaking in its beauty. Get strapped in and hang on tight!”
-Murray Farish, author of Inappropriate Behavior
“At times On a NASA Flight to Heaven reads as if it were written by a trusted historian, and then by an even more believable romantic. At once by a keen-eyed observer and an open-hearted dreamer. The stories in On a NASA Flight to Heaven go well beyond the current walled-off imaginings of the Borderlands and instead take flight into the limitless magic of its beautiful deserts.”
-Matt Mendez, author of The Broke Hearts and Barely Missing Everything
“D. Seth Horton troubles the troublesome borders of fiction and fact, fantasy and truth, which is to say that he is a storyteller of the first order, and On a NASA Flight to Heaven is the stellar debut we've been waiting for. A smart, meticulous, labyrinthine collection from a writer with talent to burn.”
-David James Poissant, author of Lake Life and The Heaven of Animals
“On a NASA Flight to Heaven reflects our broken world right back at us. D. Seth Horton writes with the urgency of someone possessed by a strange but beautiful vision. He is a writer with secrets to tell—and we should all listen very closely. These are stories that break the mold and leave you changed, a highly original collection from a highly original writer. Read this book.”
-Mitch Wieland, author of Willy Slater’s Land and God’s Dogs
"On a NASA Flight to Heaven plunges us into the middle of things without familiar narrative maps. The individual tales—full of unadorned realism and flights of surrealism, comic interventions and authentic grief, literary memoir and shaggy dog stories, Borgesian puzzles and false documents— explore borderlands, netherworlds, and boundary zones. The book as a whole forces us, pleasurably and urgently, to question what it means to occupy in-between places. D. Seth Horton, an acclaimed editor of American Southwestern literature, adds his own distinctive voice to this richly variegated tradition. A complexly imagined, splendid collection."
-K. L. Cook, author of Marrying Kind and The Art of Disobedience
“On a NASA Flight to Heaven offers a wildly original view of the borderlands Cormac McCarthy explored and Seth Horton inhabits -- the beginning and end of a country where stories start in mid-sentence and dead ends lead to every-man’s land. An author born on the border climbs fences and digs tunnels between literary fiction and personal essays, Anglo and Latino literary traditions and places where only a villain can save us from a capricious God. In Horton’s eclectic collection, and vision, a mirage is plenty of reason to cross the river.”
-Ran Henry, author of Spurrier: How the Ball Coach Taught the South to Play Football
“Through explosive, imagistic prose, D. Seth Horton puts forward tales, both fictional and nonfictional, that show how many different sorts of lives co-exist in one vast geography. From tailless alligators to gigantic birds, from runaway daughters to husbands in dire need of rehab, the creatures and characters in Horton’s stories will follow you home and linger.”
-Toni Jensen, author of Carry and From the Hilltop
“Each story in D. Seth Horton’s marvelous debut offers a glimpse into the complex and knotty lives of characters who inhabit the borderlands. These stories explore the US-Mexico border, yes, but also the contested border between the self and others. Formally innovative, moving, and deeply humane, On a NASA Flight to Heaven soars.”
-Kirstin Valdez Quade, author of The Five Wounds and Night at the Fiestas
“Introducing a sparkling new technique, short stories without the apparently mandatory beginnings or endings, D. Seth Horton writes with sly humor of an “unknown” land—the U.S./Mexico borderlands—creating a collection of great value to new writers and to all readers who care about the revolutionary evolution of fiction.”
-Sallie Bingham, author of Taken by the Shawnee, Mending: New and Selected Stories, and Red Car