How We Know Our Time Travelers is a dark, intellectual, and surreal collection of stories inspired by the uncertainty of time. Atmospheric, speculative stories explore themes of technology, climate change, reality, love and loss, and examine our post-pandemic reality and future. Anita Felicelli introduces readers to a bickering couple who use an app to track their fights in “Keeping Score,” a woman who learns that an unseen lodger is in her home in “A Minor Disturbance,” a group of creepy friends who sell jars of fog in “The Fog Catchers,” and a woman who encounters a younger version of her own husband at her art exhibition in the title story. Time travel, as the book envisions it, happens all the time, if not in the way we’re used to considering it. Unsettling, uncanny, cerebral and genre-bending, How We Know Our Time Travelers reminds us of the fragility and unreliability of memory, and its invisible impact on the larger moments of our lives.
 
Reviews
“Stunning” —Foreword Reviews, starred review

“Felicelli’s shimmering fantastical collection...explores environmental devastation, desire, and memory... Each story is transportive, no matter how bleak the subject matter. Readers will delight in Felicelli’s off-kilter vision.” —Publishers Weekly

“Darkly glimmering short fictions… Filled with engaging characters navigating their increasingly strange worlds, the stories are by turns winsome and unsettling.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
Praise
“Reading each of the stories feels like sliding a finger along a knife’s edge. If human life on this planet one day ends, and future earth-dwellers want to know what the dying days felt like, I can imagine them rescuing this sharp and daring book from some burnt-out library and, upon reading it, finally understanding what it was we did to ourselves, and how, even as we were doing it, we wished so hard that things could be different.”
—Vauhini Vara, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Immortal King Rao and This is Salvaged
 
“Felicelli’s masterful stories herald what life has become in our new reality of robots, holograms, climatic disasters, and biospheric damage. Empathetic to the aching loneliness of humans while highlighting our capacity for greater intimacies—this dazzling collection will never leave you, because the future is here.”
—Lisa Teasley, author of Glow in the Dark and Fluid
 
“Aching and wondrous . . . Felicelli's stories sing the world electric and mourn its destruction from the edge of the precipice.”
—Elizabeth Gonzales James, author of The Bullet Swallower and Mona at Sea
 
“Felicelli’s particular magic animates this longing [to revise the definitive moments of our lives] and makes us feel it too.”
—Clare Beams, author of The Garden
 
“Felicelli’s power resides in her capacity to ground us and awe us with thrilling simultaneity. She’s chiseling out a new genre called Existential Dystopia that celebrates the beauty and bruises of being alive.”
—Joshua Mohr, author of Model Citizen
 
“Haunting, powerful, and eerily prescient . . . essential reading for our volatile age.”
—Emily Holleman, author of Cleopatra’s Shadows