"Dear sick soul, you have met the universe." Farah Rose Smith's THE ALMANAC OF DUST is a stunning work of visionary imagination reminiscent of the great Angela Carter. This numinous, experimental novelette presents the dissolution and loss of a couple's intimate relationship, all set in a dust-choked world, like a nightmare-hybrid-landscape of Beckett's Endgame and Hodgson's The Night Land. In the background-via intersectional notes about and quotes from the titular, fictional tome-a bleak philosophy emerges, driven by a paradoxically dynamic, melancholic mental illness. An uncanny environmental/metaphysical catastrophe (internalized as self-neglect, grief, violence, and regret) dominates Smith's wonderfully disjointed, powerful story/treatise. The Almanac of Dust is a book to cherish, and Farah Rose Smith is a distinctive, literary talent to watch." -Jon Padgett, author of THE SECRET OF VENTRILOQUISM and founder of Thomas Ligotti Online