About The Book
These stories are not autobiographical. They are not entirely fictional, either.
Like most stories worth reading, they live somewhere in between. They were written by eight people who paid close attention to the world and then made things up in the gaps. The emotions are real. The places are real. The specific sequences of events and the named characters… those are ours alone, invented or transformed beyond recognition in the way that all writing eventually transforms its sources.
Each writer here came to this collection with a different question burning in their chest. Some of us wanted to understand grief. Some of us wanted to understand ambition, or cowardice, or the strange mathematics of belonging somewhere. Some of us just wanted to tell a story that had been sitting with us for too long, taking up space.
We did not set out to write for a particular kind of reader. We wrote for whoever might need what we were making… and trusted that such a person existed. If you are reading this, it seems that trust was not misplaced.
A note on the title: it is a provocation, not a verdict. None of us believes our stories are bad. We believe the word “bad” has been used for too long to keep certain kinds of honesty out of certain kinds of rooms. We are reclaiming it the way you reclaim any word that has been used against you… by stepping inside it and refusing to flinch.
Read in any order. Come back to whatever unsettles you. We will be here.
— Dweep, Agam, Aarya, Shirin, Sujaag, Kuber, Arzoo & Maulik