The Bedtime Emptying of Our World
In a future facsimile of the Sonoran Desert, a girl and grandfather rebirth weather itself. Fathers watch children transform into minerals, tend pain-wracked saguaros, offer treasures to the Gulf for lost sons. A girl escapes her apple prison; a man struggles against choices his parents coded into his being. These twenty-two speculative fairy tales ask: How do we navigate parenthood's impossible permutations? When will our helpers rescue us? Can we return from the void that swallowed all we love—and would we even try?
short stories by Joel Hans
The 2024 Moon City Short Fiction Award
February 17, 2026 • 256 pages
$14.95, paper • ISBN 978-0-913785-69-0
Reviews
In his debut story collection The Bedtime Emptying of Our World, Joel Hans inherits much of the old fairy tale infrastructure—sacrificial bargains, feudal monarchies, animal intermediaries, metamorphoses—but transplants it into postpastoral terrains like unstable coastlines, mineralized wastelands, and flooded homesteads, all under the same multi-lunar sky. The strange does not descend upon an otherwise recognizable world, but is the foundation of reality itself.
The Bedtime Emptying of Our World is a cohesive, wildly inventive collection. Each time you think you understand the shape of the book, author Joel Hans pulls the rug out from under you to reveal a strange, beautiful, heartbreaking direction. … Hans’s writing is lyrical without becoming self-indulgent, rich without becoming inaccessible, and strange without ever losing its emotional center. … Beneath every magical transformation, impossible creature, and dreamlike landscape is a question about how we love each other, how we lose each other, and how we continue forward anyway.
Praise
The Bedtime Emptying of Our World by Joel Hans is a remarkable debut. These breathtaking stories rock the reader with “their hopes overexposed.” What an ethics, what a lyrical feat! Hans is a true storyteller in the folkloric tradition. He brings lovely new color into our world.
Joel Hans’ The Bedtime Emptying of Our World is a captivating collection of modern fables, fairy tales and myths, and at the same time a keen exploration of familial love among the devastations of a transforming climate. Like its setting, this book is a varicolored desert bursting with life.
In this marvelous collection of lyrical stories of family and fairytales, Hans builds a world where parents and children encounter the saving grace of nature's wonders. In tenderness and metaphor, The Bedtime Emptying of Our World deftly blurs the line between generational reality and ecological fabulism.
In The Bedtime Emptying of Our World, Hans deftly leads readers through an often fantastical but always real series of worlds. In these stories, a girl lives inside an apple, crayons take on the weight of childhood dreams and parent wishes, and the moon lights the story of siblings lost and loved. In every fairy tale Hans creates, the magic lies inside the heartfelt and human relationships at the center. This is a beautiful book for every dreamer.
The otherworldly tales of Joel Hans’s The Bedtime Emptying of Our World brim with the uncanny—human-composting Gila monsters, a girl who lives in an apple, time-unwinding crows. What an exhilarating experience, exploring the fantastical desert landscape of this collection! Speculative and strange beneath its luminous daystar, yet always grounding us in the all-too-human dilemma of parenting and being parented, loving and being loved. We cast our curiosity out into these stories, like an oblation into the sea, and what returns to us every time is a wonder.