Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey

Eleven stories by the author of the critically-acclaimed HOW ANIMALS MATE. Daniel Mueller reveals the distance between our everyday masks and the selves we strain to recognize in them. A boy whose parents live apart decides to model himself after a neighborhood sociopath. A corporate systems analyst attempts to reconcile a homoerotic childhood with his conventional nuclear family. A divorcee dating a rape survivor must admit that what he loves most about her would, in his daughter, completely destroy him. Funny and grim, stylish and provocative, these stories find in disjunction and misalignment unparalleled tension and exquisite grace. Advance praise from Peter Ho Davies: “Daniel Mueller is a true American original, his raucous, ribald vision (call it sub-division surreal) at once chokingly funny, and fiercely felt. These stories move from gut-busting to gut-churning to gut-wrenching in the blink of an eye, uncovering along the way the tender in the grotesque, the lovely in the lurid, and the soul in suburbia. Mueller – big-hearted and fearless as he is – has long been one of my cult writers. Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey should give many new readers the chance to discover him.”