Butterfly Dream

The stories and non-stories in Kristine Ong Muslim' s Butterfly Dream avow mutilation as rebirth, ruin as indestructibility, and safety as an illusion. In Artificial Life, a girl is persistent in her belief that her doll will soon come to life. The Six Mutations of Jerome documents the grotesque transformations of an every-man named Jerome, while The Lonely People follows a group of individuals fleeing from the accoutrements of the modern world as manifested by carnivorous floors and a marauding giant worm. Part travelogue on the vagaries of human consciousness, Butterfly Dream is a glimpse into a reality marred by causal logic and wakefulness. Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of several books of fiction and poetry: Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), A Roomful of Machines (ELJ Publications, 2015), Grim Series (Popcorn Press, 2012), We Bury the Landscape (Queen's Ferry Press, 2012), as well as Black Arcadia and Lifeboat, two poetry collections from university presses in the Philippines. She also serves as poetry editor of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, a literary journal published by Epigram Books in Singapore, and co-editor (with Nalo Hopkinson) of Lightspeed Magazine' s anthology People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction. Widely published in magazines and anthologies, she grew up and continues to live in rural southern Philippines. Butterfly Dream is her sixth book.