Short Stuff

If you like your fiction funny, flawed, unpredictable, and occasionally a little unhinged, Short Stuff belongs on your shelf.

In this wildly entertaining collection, J.R. Wheeless takes readers on a journey through small towns, dive bars, strained marriages, awkward encounters, lonely hearts, and the strange minor disasters that make us human. These stories are packed with sharp humor, emotional honesty, and characters who feel so real you'll swear you've met them before.

Inside these pages, you'll find:

• • Two beer-drinking neighbors declaring war on a backyard gopher with catastrophic results
  • A chaotic afternoon of music, oversharing, and social disaster in the Sierra foothills
  • Lonely people searching for connection in all the wrong places
  • Flash fiction that ranges from hilarious to unsettling to heartbreakingly human
  • The kind of conversations people only have after midnight-or after three beers

Some stories will make you laugh out loud. Others will leave you staring at the wall for a minute after you finish them, with uncontrollable images racing through your mind. A few may do both at the same time.

With a voice that blends wit, melancholy, and razor-sharp observation, J.R. Wheeless delivers a collection that celebrates the messy, absurd, and deeply relatable corners of everyday life.

Short Stuff isn't just a collection of stories.

It's a collection of people.