ISBN 978-0-578-41481-2 (5.25” x 8”, 176 pp, paperback) | Short stories

The Hypothetical Man is a darkly humorous collection of stories featuring an assortment of anonymous characters—A, B, and S—all with problems. They work undercover at an amusement park in Illinois or else they work at a secret government facility that would prefer not to be named. They attend a freewheeling sales meeting with death masks on the wall. Some raise pigs, others race goats. One lives in a suburban home where he watches his wife with another man. They are, together, misled, misunderstood, and mistaken often, but their pursuit of answers never ends.

Praise for The Hypothetical Man

“The collaboration of Maliszewski and Weil yields an intellectually frothy collection… The authors display an almost palpable relish in their extended literary jousts. Readers with a similar sensibility will blissfully wallow in these elaborate yarns.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Reading The Hypothetical Man is like eavesdropping on the fevered colloquy of two think-tank eminences expelled for conundrumizing too wisely for their own good about everything crucial and uncomfortable about lives lived with upheaving acuity. Paul Maliszewski and Ryan Weil have written an entrancement of a book, and you’ll hang on their every word.”

—Gary Lutz, author of Divorcer

“These stories? narratives? accusations? recriminations? are the smartest and most fascinating literary inventions you’ll read this decade. Imagine an angry, frightened Luis Borges in an argument with himself, or Abbott and Costello if they were very, very well-read. The dueling, hilarious, self-eviscerating, meticulously crafted narratives of A and B make me think of My Dinner with Andre for the era of alternative facts, or Plato and his dialectic transported giddily into contemporary America. Every writer should read these—and anyone else who is interested in the beautiful, confusing disarray of the twenty-first century Western mind.”

—Clancy Martin, author of How to Sell and Bad Sex

“The Hypothetical Man is just the sort of fictional testament our meaning-deficient age demands—hilarious, profound, and relentlessly self-questioning. It is a tale told by two beguiling idiots; the kind of story you'd get if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were mid-level CIA appointees, Samuel Beckett were a corporate consultant, and modern American life were re-envisioned as one long shaggy tahr story. If there's any justice in our bedraggled world, The Hypothetical Man will attract a grateful horde of real readers.”

—Chris Lehmann, author of The Money Cult