Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood (from Montag Press) is available now. I’ve included links below, including ones to my favorite indies:

publisher’s synopsis:

“Bradley Sides merges the South with the weird in his latest collection of magical realism short stories, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood. Here, a boy creates a guide to his beloved pond monster, a parent weighs the consequences of the coming apocalypse, a man protects a jar of delicate moths, a test taker fearlessly faces death, a young woman rejects ownership of her vampire family’s farm, a father leaves a letter for his ghost daughter, and a flood of broken robots sparks pure joy. Full of grief, loss, and, somehow, even hope, Sides’ fantastic stories boldly and tenderly explore the complexities of humanity.”

Press & Praise:

“2024 Book of the Year” Finalist at Southern Literary Review

“15 Indie Press Books to Read This Spring” at Electric Literature

“Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for January and February 2024” at Tor.com

“5 Indie Press Books Worth Adding to Your Spring Reading List” at Books & Review

“Bradley Sides' new collection is a traveling carnival filled with pond monsters, vampire girls, fire breathing children, and minor apocalypses. It's also a collection of good-hearted people trying to make their way through unstable worlds of wonder and joy—in other words, the stories of our lives.”

—Alexander Weinstein, author of Universal Love

“Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood is a wildly entertaining ride. I loved reading about monsters, a vampire who doesn’t want to take over the family garlic farm, ghost children, the apocalypse and a prehistoric bird-sister in stories that are hilarious, unsettling, tender and wise. This terrific collection reveals not only Bradley Sides’ impressive range as a writer, but also the strange and wondrous shapes love can take.” 

—Becky Hagenston, author of The Age of Discovery and Other Stories

“In his latest collection, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, Bradley Sides’ literary imagination is extraordinary. Monsters and moths. Vampires and dragons. Holograms and ghosts. Sides gives the reader all of this and more. But this book is not just an imaginative feat, through its otherworldly lenses we see clearly what it means to be heartbreakingly and beautifully human. These stories are remarkable.”

—Andrew Siegrist, author of We Imagined It Was Rain

“With his second story collection, Bradley Sides poignantly illustrates the divide between myth and magic, between monsters and men. Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood invites readers to bear witness to the melancholic yet brilliant transformation of characters who long for family—those broken and found, who sway upon the precipice of faith and unbelief, who ache in the absence of children and parents. In a time when asking, begging, and praying for miracles isn’t enough, Sides has gifted us a book full of them.”

—Nathan Elias, author of The Reincarnations and Coil Quake Rift

“The collection is populated with Pteradons and vampires, shark-children and dragons, people transformed into moths—and yet the primary takeaway for the reader is not escapism, nor magic, nor fantasy, but instead the opposite: these stories usher us into universal emotional states of grief, loss, and desire… Sides’ collection, with its playfulness and range, is hard to categorize and a joy to read. Is it realism? Is it fantasy? Is it magical realism? Comedy? Drama? Yes, all of this and more.”

—Darrin Doyle, Electric Literature

“Yet, rather than being fantastical, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause The Flood reads more like hopes and fears made true. Across the stories, there is a longing for connection and family: lament for family lost, hope for reconciliation. Set in the American South, both the gothic and magical realism are at play, but what Sides is at his best when he is writing about the deep wounds of children, intergenerational relationships, and the intersection of communities. Each story offers its own strange beauty.”

—Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature

“With flash fiction narratives, original and unique story structures, and totally approachable storytelling, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood would make a fantastic introduction to new readers of the genre… Definitely, this collection should be considered by professors looking to add examples of flash fiction and/or experimental fiction, and certainly magical realism to their curriculum… Sides establishes himself as an unconventional storyteller who defies atypical structure, examines multiple perspectives, and tells his stories with a limitless imagination and without any concern for the rules.”

—Dawn Major, Southern Literary Review

“While Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood is a slim book at only 142 pages, it features 17 unique stories with intriguing characters and varied voices… From every angle, Sides works to keep us on our toes, taking traditional narrative elements and adding an unexpected, supernatural twist… In worlds crammed with the bizarre, the unexpected, and the supernatural, it is the mysteries we cannot answer that continue to keep us up at night.”

—Abby N. Lewis, Chapter 16

“These stories are populated by vampires, dragons, and apocalyptic moods; it’s a memorable statement of Sides’s own fictional concerns.”

—Tobias Carroll, Tor.com

“The stories are amazing, weird in a way that seems perfectly natural, and thought-provoking.”

—Cliff Garstang, Southern Review of Books

“I thoroughly enjoyed “Crocodile Tears,” Sides’ second collection. The stories are whimsical, weird, outlandish, science-fictiony, magically realistic and entertaining.”

—Don Noble, Alabama Public Radio (APR)

“The stories are still scary and funny and thrilling, and the characters are still doomed. But there’s a cohesion here in Crocodile Tears that latches the stories together even stronger than the previous collection... It moves so effortlessly. I love it.”

—Josh Denslow, Heavy Feather Review

“In Crocodile Tears Don’t Cause the Flood, Bradley Sides folds heavy themes like grief and loss into lighter elements like magic, resulting in an experimental short-story collection that feels relatable even at its most uncanny. Set very firmly in the South, each of Sides’ stories hums with an inventive playfulness that always complements, never overwhelms, the narrative.”

—Elizabeth Crowder, X-R-A-Y

“Monsters and misfits abound in the stories of Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, as do recognizable humans, entrapped in ominous settings that are oddly familiar. These stories amplify and savor an inexplicable, inevitable doom. In the world Sides creates, it is never far away.”

—Edward Journey, Alabama Writers’ Forum (AWF)

“Ghosts, monsters, and falling celestial bodies mingle with the all-too-real in Bradley Sides’ new short story collection, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Start the Flood… Fantastical creatures, some terrifying (pond monsters) and some funny (garlic-farming vampires), temper the grief, loss, and disaster present throughout the collection. Hope lightens the heaviest loads…”

—Joanna Theiss, Five South

“There’s real magic in Bradley Sides’s new collection of stories, ‘Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood’… Sides’s fiction offers a unique voice and ability to distill heart-wrenching moments into a paucity of pages—stories that smack of a mature minimalism, echoing the best short works of Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut and others.”

—Tom Mayer, Limestone Life

“This is a lovely collection for those who enjoy reading about different, weird, odd characters and the grief involved in their lives. Yet, knowing that one way or another, they survive with their kind of hope.”

—Amie Destefano, Horror Tree

“In all, Sides’ Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood was a creepfest slam dunk that felt so uncannily like real life I couldn’t look away… While in turns haunting, unsettling, unwavering, and determined, this collection identified the most unsettling monster of all: us. For those with a love for cryptids, a keen eye for the human condition, and with a kind of dark humor that allows one to laugh at the maw of strangeness, this book is for you.”

—Christopher Heisserer, North Meridian Review

“Bradley Sides blends Southern charm with the bizarre in a collection of magical realism tales. From a boy's guide to a pond monster to a parent contemplating the apocalypse, each story navigates themes of grief, loss, and hope. Characters bravely face death, reject family legacies, and find joy in unexpected places like broken robots. Sides' poignant narratives tenderly probe the depths of human complexity, blending the fantastical and the deeply human. 

—Kiefer Jones, Books & Review

“Bradley Sides’s collection Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood is filled with otherworldly creatures and the marvelously complex world of being human.”

—David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy

“These 17 flash fiction stories fully embrace the possibilities of magic and weirdness, particularly to help us reconnect with the dead... I liked this even more than his first book…”

—Rebecca Foster, Bookish Beck

“How anybody can create a tone/tenor, voice, world, and characters in so few words time and time and time again is beyond my ken… Bradley Sides is a skilled and gifted writer and you can see that on pretty much every page… I really can’t explain this collection, as I think I’ve demonstrated pretty well here. I’m sure others can, and you should look for their comments. But I’ll tell you this, you’re not going to find many collections that are as pound-for-pound good as this one.”

—H.C. Newton, The Irresponsible Reader

“Full of magical realism, this collection of short stories takes ordinary events and transforms them. Pond monsters, vampires, an incoming apocalypse, ghost children, and broken robots populate the stories, but not everything about them involves the paranormal or fantastic… The characters are so very human, moving from joy to despair and back again, taking us along for the ride.”

—MK French, Girl Who Reads

additional Mentions:

“Q&A: Magical Realism in the Rural South” at The Daily Yonder

“Magic and More: Calhoun English professor releases book of short stories” at Decatur Daily

“7 Magical Realism Stories from the American South” at Electric Literature

“‘Claire & Hank’: An Excerpt from Bradley Sides’s ‘Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood’” at Volume 1 Brooklyn

“Rooted in the Place You Know” at Cleaver

“Bradley Sides Loves The National” at Finding Favorites

“How Weird is Weird?” at If This Goes On (Don’t Panic)

“If My Book” at Monkeybicycle

“Q&A with Bradley Sides” at Deborah Kalb Books

“Author Bradley Sides Releases Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood” at The Madison Record

“What’s the Electric Lit Staff Reading?" at Instagram

“A Sit Down with Calhoun Instructor and Author Bradley Sides” at The Warhawk News

“5 Contemporary Magical Realism Stories to Add to Your Syllabus” at Big Indie Books