In Objects of Desire, Chapel Hill author Adam O’Fallon Price’s debut short story collection, writing advice is dispensed by various characters—many of whom are, themselves, writers in various stages of despair.
Make sure there’s dramatic action. Make your characters change.
Here’s another common piece of advice—don’t write short stories; nobody reads them.
“My agent has consistently pointed me away from trying to sell a collection because they don’t sell. People don’t read short stories, you know—which she’s right about, from a business perspective,” a cheerful Price said recently, over coffee at Carrboro’s Weaver Street Market, a few miles down the road from UNC-Chapel Hill, where he teaches creative writing. While he’s written two novels, Objects of Desire is his first story collection.
“The market for literary fiction is getting smaller and smaller,” he continued. “In the 15 years I’ve been publishing, I’ve seen it shrink.”
With this in mind, it’s safe to say that any author who continues to crank out stories is doing so for the love of the game. Objects of Desire, which won the 2025 Autumn House Fiction Prize and comes out October 6, reads like it was written by someone who truly enjoys what they do. Across 11 stories, points of view shape-shift, sunny North Carolina quads give way to city streets and Midwestern cornfields, and a sequence of maladjusted characters wrestle with their demons—largely unsuccessfully, it must be said.
“Adam writes at this perfect intersection of the sort of everyday everyman experience, but like, an everyday everyman who has deeply fucked up,” said the writer Melissa Faliveno, Price’s colleague in the creative writing department at UNC.
If you’re someone who reads for a happy ending, you might want to sit this one out. To anyone who likes dark literary fiction with stripes of Denis Johnson and Ottessa Moshfegh: welcome! There’s a fair amount of addiction throughout, and several suicide attempts, such that it might be difficult to spend prolonged periods of time with characters who possess tremendous appetites for self-destruction.
“Adam writes at this perfect intersection of the sort of everyday everyman experience, but like, an everyday everyman who has deeply fucked up.”
Melissa Faliveno, writer
Luckily, the short story form has brevity on its side: If a novel is a cross-country road trip, a short story is a hitchhike wherein, en route from point A to B, you might open the passenger console and find either a stash of old Burger King napkins or a gun. In Objects of Desire, you’re liable to encounter both.
And while Price’s agent is right that story collections don’t typically sell—over the past two decades, the genre has occupied an increasingly slim portion of both book deals and awards—hopefully this one can be an exception to the rule, and readers will hop in for a ride. Price is a gifted writer, and it’s fun to read him.
“I love Adam’s dedication to the quiet domestic stories of failed writers and failed relationships—people who are just sort of seeking meaning in their lives,” Faliveno said. “It feels very resonant and, I think, deeply human.”
Certainly, the characters in Objects of Desire are seekers.
They want valor, recognition. They want to pop a cold one. They want designer clothing they can’t afford. They want to see where the night goes. They want sex—sort of, at least, so long as a bit of semi-clinical copulation temporarily staves off drink-wanting. They want to cast just one look over the brink, pausing for long enough that you, the reader, wonder if they might best their demons and turn away, only for them to nudge one toe over the rim. They want another pour.
“I’m always telling my students to have your characters want something,” Price said. “Vonnegut said that thing about [how] a character should always want something in a scene—even if it’s, like, a glass of water.”
There’s Ethan, the alcoholic English teacher in “Hoboken,” who is drinking his way back to the family home he’s been kicked out of. There’s Leigh, the young soccer player in “Stone Lions,” who is outrunning a difficult childhood by brutishly taking out anyone in her way (literally).
There’s also Paul, a creative writing professor in the collection opener, “Sandstorm,” who becomes fixated on Peltz, an army veteran in his class.
Unlike the usual “blank-faced babies” in his courses, Peltz is alert and engaged, ready to spar with Paul over the merits of Raymond Carver’s fiction. He’s also talented, a fact that Paul, who is experiencing a writing slump—a life slump, really—feels threatened by. Soon, the two men are locked in a battle of ego and class anxiety, tussling through red-penned feedback and outright aggression.
You couldn’t be faulted for assuming, as I did, that Paul, who teaches at a familiar-feeling “Big Local University,” is a stand-in for Price.
But when I asked Price about it, the truth turned out to be much more interesting: When he wrote “Sandstorm” in 2011, he was an undergraduate at UNC-Chapel Hill, much closer to the perspective of Peltz than Paul. At the time, he’d returned to school after dropping out in the mid-1990s to pursue a handful of dice rolls—first, life on the road with his power-pop band, The Mayflies USA; later, a stint as a professional poker player. Then: back to school.
“It was great. Everybody should go to college at 35,” Price said. “I took History of Naval Power from this guy, Dr. Caldwell, [who] brought in part of a Greek longboat. I look around, and the students to my left and right are both asleep—you know, because they’re 20 and that’s where you’re at. But for me, I was like, ‘This is fucking amazing, that I get access to this guy.’”
At UNC, Price was mentored by the fiction writer Pam Durban, who, in a kind of academic fairy godmother move, submitted one of his stories to a journal without telling him. It was accepted, an affirmation that he was on the right track; soon after, he submitted “Sandstorm” to The Paris Review, and it was also accepted.
As for the dice, Price has landed some straights: After graduation, he did an MFA in fiction at Cornell University and published two novels, The Grand Tour in 2016 and The Hotel Neversink in 2019. Now, he’s back at UNC, on the other side of the classroom. (Also: The Mayflies USA released their fifth album last year and have another on the way in 2027, so that’s going well, too.) And in contrast to the jaded outlook of some of the book’s writer-type characters, he seems to feel a lot of warmth and hope for the next generation.
“It’s a bad time, obviously, for universities and the humanities in general, but it’s kind of a boom time for creative writing,” said Price, adding that his last intro fiction class had a 45-student waitlist—a demand, he said, that is not an anomaly in the department.
“There has been such a concerted push to sell STEM,” he continued. “There are so few jobs, and [students] feel so much pressure to do STEM classes and get those jobs. They have told me it’s a tremendous relief to just be in a class that’s fun and intellectually interesting. It’s what I think you would like college, all of college, to be like, but most of their college is really grinding this career path.”
Part of Price’s approach to teaching creative writing is helping to steer students away from black-and-white thinking: A protagonist doesn’t have to be relatable, and an ending can be ambiguous. Part of the joy of a short story is filling in the blanks.
My favorite story in the collection, in fact, is about a student—a demographic that Price said he enjoys characterizing because “people are just becoming something.”
“Dancing with Berg Hermly” centers on Mark, a college freshman plagiarizing his way toward feeling interesting. Mark is, by any measure, a little shit. But as the story goes on, you begin to feel a little touched by his struggle—a core dissociative feeling of self-hatred and not belonging.
Price writes: “For as long as he could remember, there had been a Markness about himself that he—that others—could not stand. Was it his face?—its chinlessness, the cast of simpering ingratiation? Was it some social cue he’d never learned?—a password they’d given out, in, say, third grade, that he’d been out sick for?”
Who hasn’t felt that, especially in college? Reading, you begin to see why Mark is the way he is.
“You don’t have to like a protagonist,” Price said. “You have to understand them.”
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