The short stories of Portland's own Timothy Day mix the everyday and the surreal into delightfully foreboding experiences. Discount Ceremony is so perfectly strange and oddly accessible that it could easily influence short-story writers for years to come, it’s title becoming shorthand for not just a style of writing but a particular way of viewing the world.

From the publisher: "A man adopts a pile of dirt as a pet. Bandmates moonlighting as assassins are haunted by a particularly vague highway sign. A woman discovers a tree growing out of a box in the back of her closet. Over the course of twenty-three stories, Timothy Day’s Discount Ceremony explores friendship, arrested development, loneliness, and compromised dreams, played out against a series of surreal backdrops by turns comically absurd and strikingly bleak. Adrift but uncynical, the characters populating each story strive for silver linings amidst distinctly disorienting circumstances, portraying the uncertainties and hopes of the human condition as reflected by a funhouse mirror."

Published by Game Over Books. 156 pages, trade paperback.