Bad Thoughts

Stories

By: Nada Alic

Narrated by: Nada Alic

An exhilarating and delightfully deviant debut story collection that, with comedic precision and compulsive irreverence, explores the most surreal and inadmissible fantasies of contemporary women.

“Nada Alic’s Bad Thoughts is lit up with the perception, wit, and cunning of Miranda July and Sally Rooney.” —T. Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

Nada Alic's women—the perverts, nobodies, reality TV stars, poetic hopefuls, shameless party girls, and self-help addicts of Los Angeles and its environs—are all wrestling with a shared stark reality: the modern world. To cope, they live in their baddest thoughts: the lush, strange landscape of female make-believe.

In “Earth to Lydia,” a support group meets to enjoy earthly pleasures after achieving "too much enlightenment," engaging in bizarre exercises that escalate to a point of violence and fear. The narrator of "Ghost Baby"—the spirit of a proto-child assigned to a couple whose chemistry is waning—writhes in disembodied frustration as its parents fail to conceive it. In “Daddy's Girl,” the daughter of Eastern European immigrants tries to connect to her distant and difficult father through the invention of increasingly elaborate home maintenance repairs. And in “The Intruder,” a lonely woman’s break-in fantasy quickly builds to a full-blown obsession, until she finds an unwitting partner with whom to act it out.

Though each of Alic’s characters thrive and ache in different circumstances, they all grapple with the most painful equations of modern life: love, trust, power, loneliness, desire, violation, and vengeance. And she conjures them all with a voice that is instantly arresting, unexpectedly hilarious, and absolutely unforgettable.

A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

©2022 Nada Alic (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Nada Alic’s Bad Thoughts is lit up with the perception, wit, and cunning of Miranda July and Sally Rooney. Alic offers a collection tracing the brutal and hilarious contours of humanity, with every sentence engined on the current between the two. Astute and unpredictable without ever veering into kitsch, Alic is a vital voice of our time.” (T. Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls)

“Nada Alic is one of the funniest writers I’ve read in a long time, but she also writes extremely well about the melancholic, detached, and disillusioned aspects of her characters. These stories find beauty in the absurd and poignancy in the mundane, which feels just right for the time we’re living in. Bad Thoughts is a very special, memorable book that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.” (Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else)

“The stories in Nada Alic’s Bad Thoughts will make you laugh in every paragraph, yet are so grounded in the foibles of human existence that they will also leave you feeling immensely wiser. It’s Alic’s rare gift to carefully observe what we’re too embarrassed to notice and minutely point out human flaws we take great pains to hide, so that she can unpack the absurdity of American existence even as it's hidden in plain sight. Bad Thoughts will leave you preening less yet wanting more, as you marvel at this astounding new voice in contemporary fiction.” (Meredith Talusan, award-winning journalist and author of Fairest)