Join SoLit for an afternoon with Bradley Sides! He will share from his recent short story collection, Crocodile Tears Didn't Cause the Flood. 

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About the Author: 

Bradley Sides is the author of two short story collections, Those Fantastic Lives and Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, and the upcoming novella, The Volcano Keeper, which will be out from Regal House in the fall of 2026. His fiction appears at BULL, Ghost Parachute, Necessary Fiction, Psychopomp, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. His stories have been nominated for Year’s Best Weird Fiction and featured on LeVar Burton Reads.

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Additionally, he has written reviews, interviews, and essays for Chapter 16, Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, The Rumpus, and Southern Review of Books. In 2019, he was selected to participate in Lit Hub’s “Secrets of the Book Critics.”

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Bradley holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, where he was Fiction Editor of Qu. He currently serves on the National Board for Sigma Kappa Delta, the English honor society for two-year colleges, and he is a previous board member of the Alabama Writers’ Cooperative. He lives in Madison, Alabama, with his wife. On most days, he can be found teaching writing and literature at Calhoun Community College.

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About Crocodile Tears Didn't Cause the Flood:
Bradley Sides merges the South with the weird in his latest collection of magical realism short stories, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood. Here, a boy creates a guide to his beloved pond monster, a parent weighs the consequences of the coming apocalypse, a man protects a jar of delicate moths, a test taker fearlessly faces death, a young woman rejects ownership of her vampire family’s farm, a father leaves a letter for his ghost daughter, and a flood of broken robots sparks pure joy. Full of grief, loss, and, somehow, even hope, Sides’ fantastic stories boldly and tenderly explore the complexities of humanity. 

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“The collection is populated with Pteradons and vampires, shark-children and dragons, people transformed into moths—and yet the primary takeaway for the reader is not escapism, nor magic, nor fantasy, but instead the opposite: these stories usher us into universal emotional states of grief, loss, and desire… Sides’ collection, with its playfulness and range, is hard to categorize and a joy to read. Is it realism? Is it fantasy? Is it magical realism? Comedy? Drama? Yes, all of this and more.”

—Darrin Doyle, Electric Literature
 

“Yet, rather than being fantastical, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause The Flood reads more like hopes and fears made true. Across the stories, there is a longing for connection and family: lament for family lost, hope for reconciliation. Set in the American South, both the gothic and magical realism are at play, but what Sides is at his best when he is writing about the deep wounds of children, intergenerational relationships, and the intersection of communities. Each story offers its own strange beauty.”

—Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature
 

“With flash fiction narratives, original and unique story structures, and totally approachable storytelling, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood would make a fantastic introduction to new readers of the genre… Definitely, this collection should be considered by professors looking to add examples of flash fiction and/or experimental fiction, and certainly magical realism to their curriculum… Sides establishes himself as an unconventional storyteller who defies atypical structure, examines multiple perspectives, and tells his stories with a limitless imagination and without any concern for the rules.”

—Dawn Major, Southern Literary Review

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