A rejected manuscript forces a writer to confront the possibility that a doppelganger has stolen his identity. Achilles contemplates his immortal life, edging ever closer to cruelty. Three strangers gathered at an apartment block in Singapore trade personal ghost stories. Swirling on the edge of madness, a resurrection ritual takes place on a story night. Traversing the fantastical, absurd, and grotesque, the stories of Minor Illusions explore themes of grief, memory, and human relationships as they test the limits of our tropes, archetypes, and codes of narration.
From a hypothesis of Theseus and the Minotaur walking side by side, walking towards freedom, to a contemporary character Darryl that suffers from a fictional disease, Daryl Li’s short stories present a vertiginous variety of narrators, themes and approaches—everything filtered by Li’s clever and clear voice. Written from a desolate field, but where a peculiar humor can flicker, and where style and ideas walk (freely) side by side, Minor Illusions draws its own anti-map: one made of scars left by erasures, [ ], an intricate maze of the human heart.
— Felipe Franco Munhoz, author of Dissolutions
Both reality and its fractions, its appearing and hiding paths, the blanks in it, the loss of memory, the hollowness, the echoes, the chaos, the traumas, the words in their endless connotations, the “misunderstandings, misapproximations, misappropriations”, all truths as lies are despised and cherished equally in this book.
— Anna Davtyan, author of Zora