Accomplished critic Hannah Gold makes her fiction debut in this funny, wise, curious collection of stories exploring the glorious absurdities of life in New York City

“People suffering extreme emotional states can so easily fly under the radar in this city, don’t you find?”

Across the nine stories in Why Trees, New Yorkers find themselves spotlit on a beautiful, dysfunctional stage cluttered with artists, grifters, and eccentrics all attempting to secure increasingly scarce footholds for themselves before the curtains come down. A prolific night blogger for a feminist website uses her boyfriend as a writing chair. A reality TV family hailing from Soho meets their superfan. A journalist working for an insolvent local newsroom ventures out to an artists’ encampment on Ellis Island for one final scoop. These characters’ quests—for love, creative fulfillment, a steady paycheck, a sense of belonging—are only further complicated by the follies of city living: financial and emotional insecurity, vanity, propinquity, and pure chaos.

Precise but playful, wry but emotionally resonant, Why Trees introduces a charming, perceptive, original voice through these sharp and memorable portraits of characters performing for mercurial audiences, seeking connection, and straining against the boundaries that have been set for them.