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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 07/07/2026

A starred (starred!) review from Independent Book Review called my @mooncitypress.bsky.social collection "filled with wonder" and "strange without ever losing its emotional center" and some other very kind things. independentbookreview.com/2026/07/07/t...

The Bedtime Emptying of Our World by Joel Hans

Where every story opens a door into the impossible, it also leads back to something profoundly human.

Author
Joel Hans

Genre
Sci Fi & Fantasy, Short Stories

ISBN
9780913785690

Print Length
255 pages

Publisher
Moon City Press

Where every story opens a door into the impossible, it also leads back to something profoundly human.

The Bedtime Emptying of Our World is a cohesive, wildly inventive collection. Each time you think you understand the shape of the book, author Joel Hans pulls the rug out from under you to reveal a strange, beautiful, heartbreaking direction.

From the opening story, “A Man, His Oblations,” Hans establishes the possibility that rules exist, even in a world governed by impossible transformations. A grieving father casts objects into a mysterious gulf that returns them altered, improved, and sometimes changed beyond recognition. What begins as an imaginative premise quickly evolves into something deeper: a meditation on grief, parenthood, hope, and the unbearable tension between accepting loss and refusing to surrender to it. The story is emotionally devastating, yet never sentimental. It captures the irrational bargains we make with ourselves when love and grief become inseparable.

That emotional core runs through the entire collection. Hans populates his stories with girls living inside apples, children carried through fairy-tale landscapes, impossible circuses, time-bending crows, transformed animals, moons, deserts, and mythic creatures. Yet beneath every act of wonder lies a recognizably human concern: family, memory, aging, longing, parenthood, mortality, and the desperate desire to preserve what inevitably changes.

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 24/03/2026

Sent out a few copies of the book today to folks who blurbed it, which was a special kind of joy. I have more I would be very happy to sign and send your way, too!

A book resting on top of a stack of manilla envelopes. The book features a cover with a saguaro cactus and other desert imagery with the words:

The Bedtime Emptying of Our World
Stories
Joel Hans

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 05/03/2026

This book is quite amazingly real! You can buy a copy at the @mooncitypress.bsky.social booth (775) right now and I’ll be signing copies there from 3:00-4:30 later today!

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 04/03/2026

Okay, my #AWP26: Tonight: reading one or two of the short ones from the new book with the @mooncitypress.bsky.social crew. Section 771, 8pm, just look at that lineup. Tomorrow: hanging out at the MCP booth (#775) from 3-4:30pm to chat about the collection and sign some copies!

Moon City Press
AWP Reading
Baltimore 2026

8-10pm at Section 771
504 Washington Blvd., Baltimore, MD
Wednesday, March 4

AWP 2026
Joel Hans
Author signing
Baltimore, MD

--

Moon City Press
Booth #775
3:00-4:30PM
Thursday, March 5, 2026

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 18/01/2026

Here are the acknowledgements from the collection coming out next month. Just unbelievably grateful for every reader and editor at every journal that thought my stories were worth something. & a friendly preorder link if you're so inclined: www.uapress.com/product/bedt...

In front of a painting of a saguaro cactus, the following text:

“A Man, His Oblations” — No Tokens

“The Bedtime Emptying of Our World” — Flash Frog

“Thirty-One Functions for a Girl Living Inside an Apple” — Fairy Tale Review

“The Cirrus Circus” — The Offing

“Once, Three Brothers Guided Two Moons Across the Sky” — Fractured Lit

“Cardinine, Seafoamyst, Morningite” — West Branch

“A Protest of Tortoise” — Gone Lawn

“The Times I’ll Trade Time with the Crows” — Atlas and Alice

“The Coup of Animal New” — The Masters Review

“Once, You Were Asked to Count the Hummingbirds” — New Flash Fiction Review

In front of a painting of a desert mountain landscape, the following text:

“Mouth, Wormhole, Window” — Fusion Fragment

“Sapling by Shingle by Soot” — Passages North

“The Aunt of Everything” — West Branch

“Once There Was an Upside-Down Daughter” — Booth: A Journal

“Does Yours Have a Heart, Too?” — Green Mountains Review

“Upon Return from the Land Where One Never Dies” — The Journal

“Two Decorated Skulls in the Miramonte Swamp” — Story

“The Flamingo” — HAD

“When Stars Are Just Stars” — Peatsmoke Journal

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 12/01/2026

My debut collection of speculative short stories, winner of the 2024 @mooncitypress.bsky.social Short Fiction Award, is now available for preorder and, well, I hope you'll want one when it releases this time next month. Get it from The University of Arkansas Press: www.uapress.com/product/bedt...

In front of an illustration of a saguaro cactus and woodpecker, the words:

The Bedtime Emptying of Our Word
winner of the 2024 Moon City Short Fiction Award
Joel Hans

Now available for preorder from the University of Arkansas Press
Ships mid-February

In front of an illustration of a saguaro cactus and woodpecker, the words:

"The Bedtime Emptying of Our World by Joel Hans is a remarkable debut. These breathtaking stories rock the reader with “their hopes overexposed.” What an ethics, what a lyrical feat! Hans is a true storyteller in the folkloric tradition. He brings lovely new color into our world."

— Kate Bernheimer, World Fantasy Award-winning editor, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 26/12/2025

Took the girls on the loveliest, golden-est of hikes today.

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 03/08/2025

Grateful for this today: the girls, covered in dust, leading me on another small adventure in another beautiful place.

Two young girls, the nearer in pink and further in seafoam shirts, walking away from the camera and toward an opening in a small valley with pine trees and grasses

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 22/07/2025

First, Amanda Yskamp’s artwork “gathering,” of which I’ve included just a portion of here: I love the interlocking of hands and shreds, how they seem to be holding both the scenes and each other. The perfect way to bind this group, the whole Universe. www.astrolabe.ooo/yskamp-gathe...

A sampling of Yskamp’s “gathering,” collage-like artwork that features hands holding onto various objects and scenes

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 04/07/2025

A year ago today @havehashad.com published my verbless fairy tale "The Papermoon" and it remains one of the pieces I'm most-most-most proud of. Fairy tale is form is forever. www.havehashad.com/hadposts/the...

July 3, 2024
The Papermoon
Joel Hans

The summer.

The sister. The wish. The woods. The wait.

The brother. The seizure. The grave.

The dead. The deed. The crone. The dread.

The day. The night. The day. The night.

The autumn. The winter.

The spring.

The dusk. The trees. The sky. The sard.

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 12/06/2025

Had the rare treat of joining an amazing group of authors this morning for a reading of our Best Small Fictions 2024 stories. I really enjoyed reconnecting with this story despite how much I genuinely struggled through all the weird contractions and mixed-up time logic.

"The Times I'll Trade Time with the Crow"
Joel Hans
Atlas and Alice

Full text available at: https://atlasandalice.com/2023/01/30/fiction-from-joel-hans/

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 09/06/2025

took mabel on a bike ride this morning / even just after 9am it was already too hot / oh no summer really is here

A young girl in a striped dress riding her bike down the middle of a residential street with desert vegetation on both sides

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 03/06/2025

CANNOT WAIT to tuck into this collection from @johnchrostek.com! Book mail day is a good day.

A book, surrounded by paddles of a prickly pear, with text: Boxcutters, short stories by John Chrostek

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 28/05/2025

Went on a little celebratory mountain bike right. Drove up to 7,000 feet. The light was good. The breeze was good. The hermit thrushes are back in town.

A photograph of rocky mountainous terrain with sparse treecover and vegetation, then other mountain ranges fading out into the distance, with a pale blue-to-peach setting sky.

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 27/05/2025

Well. It's still unreal to me—my DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION has WON the @mooncitypress.bsky.social Short Fiction Award and is coming LATER THIS YEAR!!! 22 stories, 12 years of my writing life. Thank you to everyone who's read my work or followed along for a part of this time. Thank you.

A graphic, split down the middle, with an oil painting of saguaro cacti, mountains in the distance, and a setting sun all in deeply yellow-orange-ochre-red colors.

The Bedtime Emptying of Our World
short stories
Joel Hans

late 2025
Moon City Press

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 25/05/2025

Wrapped up the "Elite Triple Summit" version of the Sierra Vista Summit Challenge yesterday—nearly 19 miles, 6,000 feet of elevation gain, and 7.5 hours of painful gallivanting through some exquisite Sky Islands terrain! Good friends, good steps, three very good peaks.

A picture of Joel hiking toward Pat Scott peak beneath pine trees and through terrain of loose rocks and dry grasses.

Photograph of the event "passport," with the names and elevations of each summit and a stamp for all three completed.

Single Summit
Carr Peak (9,236 feet)
Difficult
Trail length: 11.2 miles

Double Summit
Carr Peak and Miller Peak (9,465 feet)
Very Difficult
Trail Length: 15 miles

Elite Triple Summit
Carr, Miller, and Pat Scott (8,517 feet)
Extremely Difficult
Trail Length: 18.1 miles

Photograph of a distance mountain range covered in pine trees with a deep blue, partly cloud sky above. In the foreground, a rocky mountain peak covered in dry grasses.

A selfie of Joel smiling in the foreground, with pine trees and distant mountain ranges behind.

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 15/10/2023

New flash in Variant Lit today, of a father and son and fast-growing saguaros cracking and collapsing all around them. "A saguaro sprouted an arm. It reached to cradle the unabridged sky, then toppled, rootball wee and wild, laid bare." variantlit.com/once-the-sou...

Once, the Sound Dad and I Loved Most
Joel Hans

Was the ribs of the cacti cracking and stretching and cracking again. With his gloved hand, he snapped off premature blossoms and sprouted arms so the young, fast-growing saguaros might crack and stretch toward the sky and not cartwheel over and unseat their own roots.

“What did it feel like to grow as slowly as the originals?”

“Thirty years to grow as tall as you,” he said, tending. The land was empty but for us and the saguaros leaking where we had to hurt them. A sweetness rose from the sap.

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 14/10/2023

A medley of autumnal seeds the girls and I found on our evening walk.

A collection of loose seeds and seed pods resting on a piece of bamboo wood

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 04/10/2023

I have been reading lots of fairy tales for inspiration, which gives me occasion to share, once again, this most beautiful example: “The Rose” as found in Maria Tartar’s The Grimm Reader.

“The Rose”

Once upon a time there lived an old woman who had two children. Every day the youngest had to go into the forest to fetch wood. Once, when he had gone very far into the
forest, he met a small, but sturdy, child who worked hard to help him find wood and bring it right up to the house. The child vanished in the blink of an eye. The boy told his mother all about what had hap-pened, but she didn't believe him. Later the boy brought his mother a rose and told her that the beautiful child had given him the rose and would come again when it was in full bloom. The mother put the rose in water. One morning the child did not get out of bed. The mother went over to the child's bed and discovered that he had died. But he looked peaceful. And the rose was in full bloom that morning.

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Joel Hans @joelhans.com · 17/09/2023

We turned over the garden beds and added new soil and planted autumn/winter seeds in hopes they will, unlike all our other desert gardening attempts, actually flourish.

A woman crouching next to a raised garden bed with fresh dark soil, with two other garden beds behind her, and trees in the background

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