An obscure author, drawn in by the mysterious Guild of St. Cooper, must rewrite the history of a dying city. But the changes become greater than those he set out to make, and the story quickly unspools backward into an alternate history—a world populated by giant rhododendrons, space aliens, and TV's own Special Agent Dale Cooper.

An editor at The Nervous Breakdown and co-founder of Monkey Bicycle, Shya Scanlon won the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction at Brown University, where he received his MFA. He lives in New York.