Schoolboys, shopkeepers, grieving families, drifting workers, lonely men, women being watched, remembered, misread.

In Arid Dreams, Duanwad Pimwana turns ordinary lives into pressure chambers. These stories are often spare on the surface, but they move with a sly, unsettling charge — social class, gender, labour, desire and humiliation arriving through small domestic gestures rather than grand declarations.

Duanwad Pimwana is one of Thailand’s major contemporary writers, and the first woman to win the S.E.A. Write Award for a novel. Translated by Mui Poopoksakul, this collection gives English-language readers a sharp, quietly unnerving entry point into her work: realist, absurd, tender, sometimes nasty in the way life is nasty when nobody thinks they’re doing anything dramatic.

First Feminist Press edition, first printing, 2019. Paperback in very good condition, with light shelfwear. Signed on the title page by translator Mui Poopoksakul.