The car is idling on the road between where we've been and where we're going. The door's open. You coming?

This debut collection of short stories will get under your skin and take you for a ride alongside people wrestling with issues of life and death, identity and race, change and resistance to change. These characters behave bravely and awkwardly and unsavory in an attempt to be who they want to be—or can't help but being.Momentary Illumination of Objects In Motion unflinchingly peers into the places we turn away from, and shows us it's not always as neat or as clean as we'd like to imagine. Sometimes it's messy as hell.

"Arias will break your heart, blow your mind, make you laugh and bring you to the edge of everything that matters. Momentary Illumination of Objects In Motion is a phenomenal and dazzling debut that gives voice to people who live on the edges and in-between worlds. I will carry this book near my body like a firewall against the wrong world, like a fierce love song that will not be silenced." ~ Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan

"Arias made me feel that I was being read aloud to at a bar, as if someone was leaning in close, three rounds deep, and confessing to me their visions of limping mermaids, and half-Dominican, half-Harlem, half-something-else fathers, and girls counting the bullets put in their father backwards. It's a book that makes you feel whispered to and pulled in close. It's a book that makes you wince your eyes and re-see things you thought you knew." ~ Rita Bullwinkel, author of Belly Up