“We Are a Teeming Wilderness is the rare book that belongs both on the high shelf of the connoisseur and at the top of the stack on anyone's bedside table. These stories imagine the past with a keen awareness of the present, and vice versa. The result is a collection of characters—from microorganisms to hosiery salesmen to clairvoyants—who are bizarre, familiar, pathological, comic, sympathetic, foolish, and wise, sometimes all at once. Reading to escape, I found myself transported to near and distant pasts and speculative realities. Reading to learn, I found myself captivated by anthropologies at once historical, mythic, scientific, and intimately personal. Reading to enjoy, I had a plain good time; whatever readers are looking for when they pick up these stories, they’ll find more than they expect, which is the wonderful surprise of any great book.” —Claire V. Foxx, Press 53 Short Fiction Editor and Judge for the Press 53 Award for Poetry

Praise for We Are a Teaming Wilderness

Shena McAuliffe’s third book, the inventive and quietly powerful story collection We Are a Teeming Wilderness, acts as a field guide to characters who devote themselves to systems of belief—a business model, a pseudo-science, a taxonomy of the body—at odds with their lived conditions. The friction between the imaginary and the real, however, isn’t particularly damning; it’s the cracking open of a geode, an opportunity for intimacy and empathy, a breeding ground which allows us to stave off our loneliness and coexist within, to borrow one of McAuliffe’s titles, this precarious hive.

—Robert Glick, Heavy Feather Review

Shena McAuliffe shakes the dust off history and offers new ways of imagining beyond the confines of the present. These bold stories, teeming with ingenuities, give vivid life to the past, making it freshly poignant and unforgettably apprehensible.

—Joanna Scott, author of Careers for Women: A Novel

We Are a Teeming Wilderness is an expansive kaleidoscope of short stories. Through the prism of varied eras and worlds, from phrenologists to clairvoyants to the microbiome of the human body, these fifteen stories explore the hopeful desire for knowledge as well as the mysteries and griefs of the unknown. Shena McAuliffe's dazzling imagination and exacting prose are their own wonder to behold, and on page after page, I found myself underlining sentences and studying how they worked. This is an absolutely luminous collection.

—Anne Valente, author of Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

We Are a Teeming Wilderness brims with imaginative, artful stories you’ll want to sink into, stories that entertain and enlighten. Shena McAuliffe reaches into history to present captivating characters from the borderlands between science, faith, and conviction—an iridologist, a phrenologist, a microbiome named Glenn. The author is a master of the short story form, and a magician of the keenly observed detail and finely turned phrase. Prepare to be mesmerized.

—Rachel Swearingen, author of How to Walk on Water and Other Stories

I loved entering Shena McAuliffe's curious and elegant worlds, portrayed precisely and lovingly in these pages. The familiar slips into the strange, the past morphs into another universe entirely, and I could have lived in any of these stories forever.

—Anton DiSclafani, author of The After Party: A Novel

Shena McAuliffe is not so much the author, the composer of these textured and tectonic fictions as she is the arranger, the conductor, the maestro taking single songs and scoring each into idiosyncratic symphonies. She is designer and decorator of sets, a chef of a cafeteria of infinite smorgasbords. We Are a Teeming Wilderness is all about soothing cacophonies of jangled juxtapositions, foils and foiling sheets of story like the folds that make the edge of a katana, jump cut syntaxed idiomatic sawdust turned into stardust into the dust of dust. Each story is its own archeology, a dig into texts, an archeology that is a kind of fruitful and fulfilling destruction, a concoction of simple machines, fragmented vessels, bejeweled fossils. What a glorious midden! What inhabitable follies! What restored and restoried ruins!  

—Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana