A naïve and unbalanced teenage girl with claims of extraterrestrial origins only wants two things in the whole world-family and fame-but she can't help getting entangled in the lives of the eccentric and troubled humans she meets along the way: Alisen Eden, a pill-popping, unemployed waitress who finds the girl strangely familiar; Neil Manson, the neurotic psychology grad student Alisen is trying to seduce; a horror film director with delusions of grandeur; the charismatic and libidinous leader of a mysterious UFO-worshipping cult; and the stoic stranger known only as 19. As it turns out that life on Earth isn't what she thought it would be, does she even care enough to figure out where she really came from and what she's supposed to do now?

Funny, experimental, and philosophically vicious, Pretend to Feel is a book you should definitely pay money for. . . . er, for which you should definitely pay money. Whatever. Please, just buy it. It took me years to write and my children are hungry. Fine, I don't have any children, but coffee and videogames are expensive too.

Richard Rosenbaum is a writer from Toronto. His fiction and non-fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and websites, including Canadian Notes & Queries, Descant, Joyland, FoundPress & Quarterly, Cell Stories, and Overthinking It. He is Fiction Editor for Broken Pencil and the author of Raise Some Shell, a book about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

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