—Arshia Simkin, The Underline
You could say that Daniel Wallace has been working on his debut short story collection, Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars (Bull City Press, May 2025) for thirty years. And indeed, he started some of these stories back in 1995, although he’s been busy with other pursuits along the way. Wallace is the author of six novels, including his most well-known, Big Fish, which was adapted into a movie by director Tim Burton in 2003 and a Broadway musical in 2013. His memoir, This Isn’t Going to End Well was published in 2023 and he’s also authored and illustrated a children’s book. Wallace also teaches creative writing as the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at UNC Chapel Hill, his alma mater. 
When Wallace was a young writer and deciding where he should live, he said that he went on a tour of all of the places he had lived, including Birmingham, Atlanta, Washington D.C. and New York. “I picked Chapel Hill, in part, really, because of the culture and the prominence of the artists here and the ubiquity of the artists here. It’s so important—especially for a young writer to see other writers engaged in life and just doing the things you do to survive,” he said.
Beneath the Moon and the Long Dead Stars is a collection of short short stories, often called “flash fiction.” “Many of the stories, you could read at a long stoplight,” Wallace said. Although Wallace primarily does longer-form writing, he said, “I’m also really attracted to doing as much as possible in the shortest space and time.” The characters in this collection are often searching desperately for connection even as they simultaneously try to push away or deny this desire; ultimately, it’s a losing battle. The protagonist of the opening story in the collection, a two-page tale, is a man grappling with his own slippery impulses toward love and toward self-preservation. The story, titled “The Perfect Name,” begins, “How close he had come to saying that he really hadn’t had the puppy very long anyway, that it hadn’t had a chance to burrow deeply into his heart, that he had only just started changing his entire life to accommodate it…” Of this story—and the collection in general—Wallace noted that for him, it’s important to convey emotion without resorting to sentimentality, to move his readers with the story and the craft.
I asked Wallace what he thought was the thematic throughline in these stories and he took a moment to think. “Somebody told me that it was about longing,” he said, finally. Wallace explained that he never sets out to write with an overarching theme in mind, although one can often emerge, almost by accident. “I don’t want to generalize…but I do feel like I’m representative of a lot of people when I say that we live so much of our life ahead of ourselves, looking ahead of ourselves, like—‘what’s next for us? what are you working toward?’ really until there is this certain apex in our lives where that stops being the case, where there’s no more toward where you’re going,” Wallace said. He added, “We’re longing creatures. We’re always longing for something. We never sit still. We never say this is enough.”
Wallace will be at Flyleaf Books on May 20, 2025 at 6:00 pm for an author talk and book launch. He will also give a reading at the Eno Arts Mill on Wednesday, June 11, at 6:00 pm.
Learn more about Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars and preorder at Bull City Press; learn more about Wallace at http://danielwallace.org/ and on Instagram at @danielwallace1
