The Loss Detector

Set in coastal California, The Loss Detector is a funny/sad portrait of teenage blues and of a small, transplanted family of non-conformists. The flawed but lovable characters in Pokrass’ novella remind us of how the world’s most beautiful places are not always the easiest in which to thrive. Moments of giddy, perceived freedom set against resignation dot the narrative in such a way that will leave you changed.

Praise for The Loss Detector

“Meg Pokrass is the virtuoso of the weird, a specialist of the out-of-the-blue. Her stories take the unexpected route every time, so that with each line the reader is bumped out of her preconceptions. Sometimes even the end of a sentence cannot be counted on. Her narration is confiding but marvelously unsettling…everything you never knew a novella-in-flash could be.”
– Mary Grimm, author of Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time

“Meg Pokrass’s sentences are shot through with wildness and her characters are deliciously untamed. The Loss Detector may be about stumbling adolescence within a dysfunctional family but every paragraph in it is a bible for how to live – with humour, affection, and a dose of anarchy.”
– Michael Loveday, author of Three Men on the Edge

The Dog Seated Next To Me

Praise For The Dog Seated Next To Me

“Meg Pokrass achieves so much deep characterization in such a tight space that she is like an architect of tiny houses that allow her characters to live full lives in extremely small spaces.”
– Aimee Parkison, Rain Taxi

“The stories of Meg Pokrass are like beautiful bruises. I read them and ache. Sparse, poetic, insightful, and always astonishing. This is writing that makes you feel alive.”
– Angela Readman, author of Something Like Breathing

“In the universe of Meg Pokrass’s fictions, planets are gloriously misaligned, stars and suns trail love and desperate sadness, black holes serve up dogs, spiders, cats, and galaxies explode everything we thought we knew about the human heart. It is an ever-expanding universe. No other like it.”
– Pamela Painter, author of Wouldn’t You Like to Know

“To enter the portals of Pokrassland is to go on a magical journey…Unpredictable, funny and charming, the world Meg Pokrass builds in The Dog Seated Next to Me is a location readers will enter gladly and, mesmerised, they will most definitely want to stay.”
– Nuala O’Connor, author of Joyride to Jupiter and Becoming Belle

Click on the icon to view videos of readings from The Dog Seated Next To Me, as well as songs inspired by stories in the book.

Praise for Previous Collections

“Meg Pokrass bops and slams through these little stories like some genius extraterrestrial psychic on a world tour of the human heart. Her language is supercharged and witty, with humor and sadness in approximately equal amounts.”
– Bobbie Ann Mason, author of Shiloh and Other Stories

“Meg Pokrass writes like a brain in search of a body. Warm, dark, unforgiving.”
– Frederick Barthelme, author of Double Down

“The people in these stories need Meg Pokrass. Their lives are tough but her imagination is the fire-lasso that can save them, save us. In her work, off-kilter is the same as clear-eyed focus. Here, strange and normal go hand-in-hand, a marriage that explains nothing but makes so much clear. Time after time, these little stories read big.”
– Bob Hicok, author of Elegy Owed and This Clumsy Living

“I dare you to read a Meg Pokrass sentence and not want to read the next. Just enter that voice voice and it makes magic. It’s the kind where you don’t know where you’re going until you’ve left, but you know it was deeply right to have been there. Unassuming, ridiculous, insightful, dark.”
– Robert Shapard, editor of Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015)