Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been?
Stories
by Andrew Farkas
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It has been said of Andrew Farkas’ stories that they “eff the ineffable.” In Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been?, Farkas continues effing away by plumbing the depths of identity, questioning how we define the self, and yanking the rug out from under our comfort zones. Whether through an existentially terrifying brochure for a paradise island vacation, an insurance salesman who refuses to believe he’s actually Napoleon, a dead man who finds death superior to life, or an overcrowded bar that possibly signifies the end of the world, Farkas investigates in these stories that elusive idea of who we think we are. Follow a detective seeking someone confoundingly indescribable, a salvager befriending sentient warehouses, a motorist proving that you should never ask for directions, and the first person (or maybe three) to circumnavigate the globe in Farkas’ whirlwind of witticisms, bewildering entropy, and stifling indecision. Yeah, sure, the Oracle of Delphi may’ve said, “Know Thyself.” But in Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been?, Farkas counters with: “Nice maxim. Now how’s about you show us how.”
Content Warning: mild language, dark sarcasm
Praise
“Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been? perfectly highlights the rare talent of Farkas. A modern-day Vonnegut, Farkas is able to put forth giant philosophical questions in ways that are heightened by his intellect and humor while still being accessible to those of us without our PhDs. It is rare to find a smart person, rarer still to find a smart person who is funny, and it is almost impossible to find a smart person who is funny and able to connect to a common person without sacrificing his wit. This collection is a treasure of hilarious, existential terror and longing.”
—Jesi Bender,
author of Kinderkrankenhaus and The Book of the Last Word
“The fictions in Andrew Farkas’ Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been? may upon some slight reflection seem to invite comparisons to Coover, Borges, at times, Beckett—the multivalent ingenuity and impressive command of voice in these fictions are immediately obvious—but such comparisons can’t fully capture the sheer generosity of this brilliantly disorienting, funny, and ultimately sui generis investigation into identity. If you somehow haven’t ever been a fan of Farkas before, you are now.”
—Gabriel Blackwell,
author of Doom Town and Correction
“Absurd and quizzical, Farkas’ stories play with what stories are and can be, but paradoxically by the very act of doing so unearth something endearingly (and flawedly, if flawedly is a word—spoiler: it’s not) human.”
—Brian Evenson,
author of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell and Song for the Unraveling of the World
“I’m not the kind of person who smugly delights in the suffering of others, but Andrew Farkas’ collected characters rock a capacious, capricious, ambulatory despair, whispered telephonically from beneath an indescribable Midwestern sky out to the very edge of the expanded universe. Each story’s iteration has its own unexpected punchline: a warehouse is a bar is stamped and certified dead. And when tomorrow finally arrives—late, as usual, and frumpy and still involuntarily single—the apocalypse knock knocks, and although the sky might be dreadfully common, these stories are majestic.”
—Lily Hoàng,
author of Underneath and A Bestiary
“Andrew Farkas is an infernal calculating engine producing in Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been? a mess o’ finely machined machine-like fictions. There is a sublime relentlessness in the generative power of the permutations at all levels from word to sentence to paragraph to page. He exhausts exhaustion effortlessly. These inventive hypoxic hieroglyphs gin-up ingeniously a whole new notion of the genus: story and the species: short.”
—Michael Martone,
author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and editor of The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne
“Albert Camus’ The Stranger meets George Saunders’ Tenth of December: Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been? gifts the reader with the playful humor of a head-scratcher without a head. Baffling, absurdist, philosophical, existential, and hilariously disturbing, in this collection, the paradox of finding the self morphs ‘the other,’ daring to ask how we reach the core of identity when our center keeps shifting.”
—Aimee Parkison,
author of Suburban Death Project and Sister Séance
“Farkas’ serial subjectivities inspect the rigid core of the rubbery stuff we call consciousness. This is a funny, playful, ultimately quite serious book about the places and ways we meet, as well as the time that swipes everything back.”
—Hugh Sheehy,
author of Design Flaw and The Invisibles
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• Fiction | Literary | Short Stories
• 5” x 8” Perfectbound Trade Paperback
• Cream Paper, 208 Pages
• Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-946580-57-3
• Paperback ISBN-10: Coming soon
• Hardcover ISBN-13: Coming soon
• Hardcover ISBN-10: Coming soon
• Ebook ISBN-13: Coming soon
• Ebook ISBN-10: Coming soon
• LCCN: Coming soon
• First Edition: February 14, 2026
• Short URL: TK
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Cover design by Leah Angstman, with artwork by Ptter Hill.
About the Author
ANDREW FARKAS is the author of The Great Indoorsman: Essays, The Big Red Herring, Sunsphere, and Self-Titled Debut. He is associate professor of creative writing at Washburn University and an editor for Always Crashing. You can find him at thegreatindoorsman.org.
Media & Images
• Coming soon.
Distribution & Sales
Booksellers can order this book through their Ingram ordering catalogs for 50% discount with free returns or through Asterism Books for 50% discount with no returns (we will accept free returns of Asterism purchases back to us directly; please email altcurrentpress @ gmail . com if you need this return service option).
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