Misheard - by Bill Malcolm (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

No one leaves a moment carrying the same story.

In MISHEARD: Nine Stories of Half-Heard Lives, delivers a literary short story collection about love, longing, memory, desire, betrayal, self-deception, and the private meanings people build when what was said, what was meant, and what was heard refuse to line up. Across nine standalone stories, characters reshape reality into versions they can bear to live with, even when those versions cost them intimacy, truth, or each other.

• A man spends eleven years turning a brief rooftop conversation into the central romance of his life.
• A husband follows his wife to a motel and becomes certain she has betrayed him, only to discover something stranger and more intimate than infidelity.
• A therapist learns too late how much one honest sentence can alter the course of a relationship forever.
• A woman helps invisible young men get dates with guerrilla-style intervention
• A food truck owner punishes arrogance with heat.
• A pastor becomes trapped between desire and reputation
• A man losing his grip on language reaches for one last word that still means home.

By turns sharp, funny, unsettling, tender, and quietly devastating, MISHEARD explores the emotional distance between shared experience and private truth. These are stories about romantic delusion, marriage, obsession, shame, memory, illness, jealousy, loneliness, and the ways people misread one another in order to survive. They are also stories about how private fantasy can harden into belief, how love and projection can become tangled together, and how a single moment can live on in two people's minds as two entirely different lives.

With strong voice, psychological tension, and character-driven storytelling, MISHEARD is literary fiction for readers who love contemporary short stories, relationship drama, emotionally complex characters, and stories that linger long after the final page. It will appeal to readers drawn to intimate human conflict, dark humor, quiet heartbreak, and the fragile space between what happened and what someone decides they heard.