Here Comes the Champ

Shadow-selves abound in Dragon’s debut story collection, The Champ is Here. As a regular contributor to the minimalist-aligned annual NOON, and taking cues from Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Charles Simic, the author specializes in prose miniatures with a pared-down style, where porous identities seep in from the fiction’s margins. His narrators daydream themselves into boxers, pumpkins, and drowning victims. Parakeets die like bats, and laborers only know they exist when their workplace’s punch-in clock confirms: “IN AT ALL.”