Anhedonia

Anhedonia is a surreal, interlinked collection of short stories that follows a constellation of artists drifting through the world with ink-stained hands and hollowed hearts. Each narrator is a writer, poet, or dreamer whose devotion to the written word has eclipsed the contours of ordinary life, leaving them brilliant, broken, and strangely weightless. Across continents and languages, an unstable author survives on half-eaten restaurant leftovers, convinced that employment would rob him of the few lucid hours he has to chase his masterpiece. A luminous poet—beautiful, talented, and quietly ruthless—moves into her boyfriend's apartment not out of love but convenience, treating relationships as temporary shelters for her creative storms. And in the haunting title story, an emotionally vacant writer wanders through life as if observing it from outside his body, dissecting moments he never fully lives, cataloguing emotions he cannot feel. Bound together by their loneliness, obsessions, and the ache of creation, the characters in Anhedonia speak in fractured, dreamlike, depressive voices. Their realities warp and shimmer as the boundary between life and art dissolves: lovers become metaphors, apartments turn into cages, cities blur into notebooks, and ambitions devour whatever tenderness remains. Bleak, darkly funny, and strangely tender, Anhedonia is a portrait of artists who have given everything to their craft—except perhaps their ability to live.