How We Know Our Time Travelers is a dark, intellectual, and surreal collection that explores themes of technology, climate change, reality, love and loss. These stories examine our contemporary reality of balancing a pre- and post-pandemic life, and the pliability of our relationship with time. This book reminds us of the fragility and unreliability of memory, and its invisible impact on the larger moments of our lives.
Praise for How We Know Our Time Travelers
“Felicelli’s characters may navigate time and space in their own distinctive ways, but the driving force behind their motivations remains, crucially and poignantly, the pursuit of love.” —Hannah Bae, San Francisco Chronicle (Datebook)
“Reading each of the stories in How We Know Our Time Travelers feels like sliding a finger along a knife’s edge. If human life on this planet one day ends, and future earth-dwellers want to know what the dying days felt like, I can imagine them rescuing this sharp and daring book from some burnt-out library and, upon reading it, finally understanding what it was we did to ourselves, and how, even as we were doing it, we wished so hard that things could be different.” —Vauhini Vara, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Immortal King Rao and This is Salvaged
“How We Know Our Time Travelers is aching and wondrous, full of longing for what could have been, as well as an insatiable hunger for what little we have now. From near futures about to be washed away in a deadly tide, to a present world shrouded in the smoke of distant wildfires, Felicelli’s stories sing the world electric and mourn its destruction from the edge of the precipice.” —Elizabeth Gonzales James, author of The Bullet Swallower and Mona at Sea.
“A story collection about the costs of the way we move through time, both collectively– sweeping toward the climate disaster that’s rendered gorgeously and devastatingly here– and individually. The characters in How We Know Our Time Travelers build themselves clay children, holograms of their dead families, and whole armies of automatons based on long-vanished girlfriends, and they invent elixirs of eternal life and time machines, all in an effort to revise the definitive moments of their lives. Felicelli’s particular magic animates this longing and makes us feel it too.” —Clare Beams, author of The Garden
“Haunting, powerful, and eerily prescient, Felicelli’s surreal new collection is essential reading for our volatile age. From decade-jumping street kids dodging steam tunnel apparitions to an app-happy couple carelessly gamifying their relationship, her unforgettable characters grapple with memory, technology, and time itself as they face down a terrifying future, one hounded at every turn by ghosts of the past.” —Emily Holleman, author of Cleopatra’s Shadows
“With deftness, wisdom, and the beauty of artful language, Anita Felicelli’s masterful stories herald what life has become in our new reality of robots, holograms, climatic disasters and biospheric damage. Empathetic to the aching loneliness of humans while highlighting our capacity for greater intimacies and our bending of time whether in romance, technology engagement, dementia, delusion or staring down death—this dazzling collection How We Know Our Time Travelers will never leave you, because the future is here.” —Lisa Teasley, author of Glow in the Dark and Fluid
“Felicelli’s power resides in her capacity to ground us and awe us with thrilling simultaneity. She’s chiseling out a new genre called Existential Dystopia that celebrates the beauty and bruises of being alive.” —Joshua Mohr, author of Model Citizen
“A luminous and poignant collection. Anita Felicelli writes with a deep intelligence and longing. These stories linger with you long after the last page.” —Akil Kumarasamy, author of Meet Us by the Roaring Sea
“In Anita Felicelli’s stunning short story collection How We Know Our Time Travelers, technology and the supernatural are rival routes to understanding time, loss, and memory. These speculative stories are set in California in the near future and are marked by environmental anxiety…In the grief- and regret-tinged speculative stories…heartbroken people can’t alter their pasts, so they’ll mold the future instead.” —Foreword Reviews, starred review
This “shimmering fantastical collection…explores environmental devastation, desire, and memory….Each story is transportive, no matter how bleak the subject matter. Readers will delight in Felicelli’s off-kilter vision.” —Publishers Weekly
“Darkly glimmering”—Kirkus
“Felicelli…provides sometimes whimsical, deeply insightful perspectives.”—Nob Hill Gazette