Reading Juan Carlos Reyes' work feels like shining sunlight onto complex human emotions, as if the soul could be gently removed from the body, examined, polished, and put back a little better than before. I adore this. -A. Rafael Johnson, author of Absinthe Party at the Fly Honey Warehouse and The Through

Juan Carlos Reyes writes with wit and precision and an off-kilter brazenness that is refreshingly original and disturbing in a good way. He gets inside the psyche of his characters and they get under your skin. It's fun and harrowing stuff. -Mark Haskell Smith, author of Elephant Crunch

Three Alarm Fire is a daring book, alive with myriad voices. Family dramas and inner city conflicts unspool like detective stories, academics exchange metaphysical theories about language, characters get swallowed by our broken online discourse, and literary hoaxes contaminate our reality with their fictions. This is a collection of alternate histories and alternate perspectives. The stories spread across the page like brilliant fire. -John Englehardt, author of Bloomland

In his debut story collection, Juan Carlos Reyes builds worlds upon the page that extend beyond the page. These are stories cast in streetlight and starlight, stories whose characters don't reflect life but embody it fully. The pages tremble with aliveness. And every story roars. -B.J. Hollars, author of Year of Plenty: A Family's Season of Grief

Haunted by violence yet reaching for connection, these stories reveal characters in states of longing and wonder. With Three Alarm Fire, Juan Carlos Reyes proves that he is unafraid to inhabit the minds of those fumbling towards belief in their own humanity. As readers, we are compelled to think through their choices-and with them, our own. There can be no greater gift from literature. -Kristen Millares Young, author of Subduction

Three Alarm Fire is a heartrending and urgent collection. Juan Carlos Reyes' prose is tender, deeply understanding, and captivating. While reading, I found myself imagining what stories might emerge if Don DeLillo and Clarice Lispector spent an afternoon together in a small café talking about dying empires and the types of love that still bind us. These are those stories, and so much more. -Michael Zapata, author of The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

Reyes delivers the existential battle between function versus imagination with striking elegance and skill. -Rigoberto Gonzalez, author of The Book of Ruin

How to do justice in a few words to the beauty and elegance and strangeness and sadness at play. Jeffrey Eugenides meets Dumitru Tsepeneag meets Magdalena Tully (channeling Italo Calvino). -Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie

Reyes's voice is supremely confident, and his alternative universes recall the harrowing landscapes of Coetzee and the playfulness of Borges. -C. P. Heiser

In the bold, experimental stories of Juan Carlos Reyes's Three Alarm Fire, reading is a riddle that results in salvation.

Shifting in register from abject horror to cool irony and featuring slippery, compelling details, this is a book filled with sudden, slicing truths that takes challenging the act of reading itself as its raison d'être. Emotions roar out of its pages, pure, raw, and bristling. Long, meandering sentences are placed at the fore, with the prose doubling back on itself, bounding forward again, and experimenting with language and meaning. ... Three Alarm Fire is an intrepid hybrid collection that highlights how people and relationships are riddles. -Elaine Chiew, Foreword Reviews