Bad Houses is John Elizabeth Stintzi's follow-up to their widely praised 2022 novel, My Volcano (published by Two Dollar Radio in the US and Arsenal Pulp in Canada), which was named a Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and the New York Public Library. Their first novel, Vanishing Monuments (Arsenal Pulp, 2020), was a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and their first poetry collection, Junebat, was published by House of Anansi in 2020. The author's previous books have received glowing reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, The Toronto Star, Locus Magazine, and others. Their works have been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Korean. The author (who uses they/them pronouns) lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where they teach writing and literature at the Kansas City Art Institute. They go by JES (pronounced "Jess"). This new book is a collection of dark, bizarre, and humorous short stories that revolve around trauma, mental health, queerness/transness, art, family, and home. Each story is accompanied by a surreal hand-drawn b&w illustration by the author.

Comically strange yet imbued with humanity, these stories will appeal to fans of George Saunders, Yoko Ogawa, Karen Tei Yamashita, Kelly Link, Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah, Alice Munro, Nikolai Gogol, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In John Elizabeth Stintzi's words, "These are stories that I've written over the course of a long career in short stories--usually, they come from an exploration into an image, or a voice . many of these were written in very particular fugue states.".