Low-Risk Activities - by Jesse Efron (Paperback)

About the Book

In Low-Risk Activities, J Efron crafts a kaleidoscopic collection of stories and experimental forms that confront identity, memory, surveillance, and the strange rituals of everyday life. From mythical memoirs to psych exams and surreal bureaucracies, each entry maps a terrain where language distorts, and reality doubles back on itself.

Book Synopsis

Formally daring and emotionally disarming, Low-Risk Activities spins out twenty-two uncanny stories that feel like dispatches from a future already here--and already unraveling.

J Efron's Low-Risk Activities is a genre-defying collection that slips between interview transcript, personal confession, government form, and speculative fable--told through the voices of orphans, immortals, office workers, digital nomads, and posthuman survivors. These are characters in limbo, each trying to make sense of a fractured world where logic doesn't always follow law.

The book opens with Lan Caihe, a faux-memoir in which a gender-fluid, possibly immortal narrator navigates trauma, desire, and the politics of being unclassifiable--part myth, part autofiction, and entirely singular. Later entries mimic psychological evaluations, immigration interrogations, and philosophical questionnaires, inviting the reader not just to observe, but to participate.

Structured like a psychic excavation, Low-Risk Activities questions how we define personhood, how language shapes identity, and how systems reduce people to data--only to lose the meaning of what that data once held. Efron's voice is intimate yet disorienting, full of humor, dread, and lyrical estrangement. Fans of Anne Carson, Jenny Boully, and Rivka Galchen will find familiar resonance in this work that refuses to resolve neatly--and in doing so, reveals something startlingly true.

Review Quotes

"A daring and complex exploration of the borders and boundaries of personal, cultural, social, sexual, and written identity. An unforgettable book both delicate and unflinching, explicit yet discrete in all the right ways."

--Aimee Parkison, author Body of Evidence and Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman

About the Author

J Efron's work has appeared in several literary journals, including 2022 Best of Small Fictions, SAND, Black Warrior Review, and Kyoto Journal. J Efron is a sustainability coordinator and regional development specialist in Japan.