"Raise less corn and more hell"—
not Mary Elizabeth Lease, but “a right good bit of advice”
In these fifteen stories about the sadness of addiction and (often queer-coded) sex in small-town America, an autistic woman in a supportive housing community discusses the “domestic dispute” she had with her boyfriend by imagining their apartment as a literal glass house. A young girl plays with the sentient figurines in her family’s crèche while her mother’s infidelity unfolds publicly. An introverted young librarian is cornered by a local eccentric and that small, tense interaction fills her weekend with meaning. The voice of a white settler reflects on chasing the Meskwaki tribe out of their historic territory, only to hide behind dismissive aphorism. A diptych portrays a young man’s grief over two deaths, his great aunt and a blue-collar boy he had feelings for in high school.
Akin to the clear-eyed, often hard-edged fiction of Donald Ray Pollock (Devil All the Time) and the lyric prose of Jamel Brinkley (Witness), More Hell engages characters struggling for self actualization and personal identity in a fast-changing space otherwise unaccustomed to change.
al-Sirgany presents that space—the Driftless Area and its adjacent territories—as it is, less monochrome in its mentalities than it is often portrayed, though still largely white and painfully confined by its geography.
Advance Praise for More Hell
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"A Proustian cubist could paint me” says a character in More Hell. And it can be hell to jaggedly put back together what we want to remember, only to face what we wanted to forget. Adam al-Sirgany’s stories show us that the worst of our bored youth and the rages of adulthood are seeds nevertheless and they can sprout into something new and altogether necessary, “half out of your sadness, half out of other people’s fictions.
Manuel Muñoz
author of The Consequences, MacArthur Genius
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[T]his isn’t another book about dwindling opportunity or the ravages of opioid addiction. These stories explore the challenges of figuring out who you are, being seen for who you are, and being accepted for who you are; not only by others, but also by yourself. Often failing, rather than succeeding, at all of those things.
Adam’s stories are...always a worthwhile journey.
Dennis Gage
famous mustache, host of My Classic Car
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In the tradition of Winesburg, Ohio, Adam al-Sirgany has given us a truly lovely collection of portraits and stories. Taken together they weave together a set of characters and places with a quiet urgency. The figures we meet in More Hell are presented with matter-of-fact poignancy as they navigate everyday disappointments while trying to preserve some measure of their dignity.
Steven Conn
author of The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural American For What It Is - and Isn't
- Like the author himself, funnier than the author would describe it.
TW Blankenship
acclaimed Mississippi River rafting guide
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[W]eird' and magical and realistic and scary and whimsical all at once...
Nicole Schmidt
editor and poet
BOOK DETAILS ISBN: 978-1-952600-62-3
Publication date: 19 August 2025
Paperback price: $16.00 USD