The narrators of Nathan Dragon’s Errand Weather have “big, big plans.” Among them: buying scratch-off lottery tickets, finding a regular spot on a park bench, walking a dog, eyeing out the right amount of spaghetti to cook (impossible), making a home. If the tone of these two linked novellas may sometimes be ironic, it’s never disingenuous. This is a book attuned to the ways seemingly minor things take on outsize importance, how the everyday turns strange. How a life composed of decision and drift, attention and distraction, routine and chance, is always revealing itself anew and accruing meaning.

These acutely perceptive fictions capture both a sense of place and a dreamy dislocation. Details observed and lived in, synesthetic sensations, highly specific yet universal feelings you can’t quite name—Errand Weather is ultimately about having the words for not having the words for it. Just as the surface stillness of a photograph evokes greater depths, Dragon’s economical, hypnotic prose draws you in. You may not quite know where you are, but it’s somewhere you want to be.

Praise for Errand Weather and Nathan Dragon

“Dragon says in four lines what takes most 400 pages. But this succinct tempo is not without feeling. Loneliness, humor, at some points so lovely it reads like poetry.”

—Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs and Earth Angel

“Rich with astute intuition and unexpected linguistics that hold far more heart than may rush up to meet the eye, Errand Weather reads sort of like Beckett reporting by postcard for Reader’s Digest, or maybe an even more meta-minimalist and similarly instant classic-status rural redux of Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever. However you slice it, Nathan Dragon is the real deal, a stunning stylist brokering fresh food for thought into the next life of the American sentence fragment right when we couldn’t need it more.”

—Blake Butler, author of Molly

“This making of a book is all about organizing, about gathering words into conventions. The joy comes when the organization breaks down and you encounter moments that are beautifully gathered, seemingly spontaneously, into something unexpectedly unconventional. What makes Errand Weather stellar is Nathan’s insistence, even as he gathers his material together, that what he is gathering never matters more than his exploration of what it means to gather.”  

—Ken Sparling, author of Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall and Not Anywhere, Just Not

“Nathan Dragon has written some of my favorite contemporary American stories.”

—Kathryn Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch

“Nathan Dragon's miniature worlds of domesticity are sharp and voice-driven, with the compression of Diane Williams and the whimsy of Robert Walser stories. They are full of sublime beauty and longing, wringing your heart and reminding you what it means to be alive.”

—Babak Lakghomi, author of Floating Notes and South

“Nathan Dragon is the master of the deceptively simple sentence.”

—Merve Emre, contributing writer at The New Yorker

Nathan Dragon is the author of The Champ Is Here. Dragon is a frequent contributor to NOON Annual. His work can also be read in The Paris Review, The Baffler, Cluny Journal, Byline, Soft Union, and New York Tyrant. Along with Raegan Bird, he is the co-founder and editor of the publishing project Blue Arrangements.