“The stories of “Play Dead” delight in trickery…Its collective narrative voice is somehow one of comfort, of solace; it might even evoke feelings of nostalgia - if you were raised in The Twilight Zone.” —Judge Joe Vallese

“Play Dead” explores the darker side of games in twelve stories that bridge the literary, the speculative, and the horrifying. These are the games you play on road trips and in schoolyards, on pub trivia nights and fluorescent-lit courts. Among the games are pranks, superstitions, riddles, and other traditions that constitute childlore: the specific strain of folklore passed on to children by other children. For some of these characters—immigrants, first-generation and third-culture kids—games offer a new language with which to speak to the world. For others—women navigating the U.S. healthcare system, a tyrant’s kingdom, the modern dating scene—games only serve as a painful echo of a world that feels rigged against them, a world in which they’re sure they cannot win. Shot through with experiences of migration, violence, powerlessness, resistance, fraught love, and life-saving friendship, these stories live in the space between longing and belonging, between capture and escape. They ask: What happens when all the rules of the game get broken? And if you play dead long enough—if they count you out completely—what are the odds you get them on the next attack?

Kristina Ten's stories appear in McSweeney’s, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We're Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, Nightmare, Uncanny, and elsewhere. Along with winning the Stephen Dixon Award and the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award for Short Fiction, she has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Locus Award. Ten is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and the University of Colorado Boulder's MFA program in creative writing. You can find her online at kristinaten.com