Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds
By (Author) Christian Moody
Dzanc Books
Dzanc Books
21st January 2026
United States
General
Fiction
Short stories
Fiction: general and literary
Paperback
200
For fans of George Saunders and Haruki Murakami, Christian Moody delivers his debut speculative short story collection,Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds,full of tales that are strange, original, and enlightening
Best friends George and Elly start a hide-and-go-seek club inspired by their love of the game, which goes too far when Elly stays missing for years. A private and ashamed orphan lives in a town where trees have video cameras and spy on the woods on the outskirts. In a world with hardly any birds left, a struggling family lives alone in the woods, where the father begins to create mechanical birds which threaten the only life left. And a man working for a high-end, organic egg corporation spots an anomaly in one of the eggs, which, along with the fact that his wife and daughter spontaneously get pregnant at the same time, sparks his journey to uncover the company's secrets.
Winner of the 2023 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, Moody's collection delights in the absurd and dystopian, weaving in themes of climate change, surveillance, privacy, and technology that coalesce into a profound statement about where our world is headed.