Hey You Assholes

by Kyle Seibel

Kyle Seibel's debut short story collection is a bracing look into the lives of society's misfits.


From a junkyard worker haunted by the death of a special cat to dinosaurs that materialize to dispense life advice—these stories explore the thin line between the mundane and the surreal.


Hilarious, poignant, gritty and bizarre, Hey You Assholes heralds the arrival of a bold new voice in American fiction.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

190 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 25, 2025

Reviews

[Kyle Seibel]

Hi this is Kyles grandpa on Kyles phone I don't know what to say he just handed me his phone and said hang on what did you say talk to text I know that I can see that yes you said well something I forget now Kyle what does this mean this little message this little message popped up you want me to say what well i do i think you're a nice young man with many gifts Kyle Kyle can we check my Facebook now you promised

[stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love making my library buy books

[Courtney Maum · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED THIS BOOK. The stories were so well written--- so funny and unique but also heartbreaking. Seibel really nails his endings. Highly recommend and can't wait to read more from him.

[Phil reading_fastandslow · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s rare for me to find a book both emotionally affecting and laugh out loud funny, but “Hey You Assholes” is that book for me. Kyle Seibel’s debut published by Clash Books is a tragicomic short story collection which often shows how real cultural events intersect with the absurdity of a person’s most emotional moments. Where most short stories (even those by favorite authors) leave me thinking “huh, okay,” these left me thinking “oh, shit.”

Kyle Seibel is a Navy veteran with no MFA; he taught himself to write by reverse-engineering Denis Johnson and others. You can hear the influence of Johnson’s work here, but Seibel’s voice is distinct. The characters feel like people I’ve known over the years - warehouse workers, people in foodservice, substitute teachers, people generally figuring out how to live with disappointment and still find something worth holding onto. It’s a remarkable book.

Favorite stories: The Fish Man, Be Gentle, Mr. Bananaman

[Sheldon Birnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK, this was pretty dang good, Kyle! Pretty dang good indeed.

[Chad]

I was lucky enough to get an advance copy. This book is a blast.

I absolutely love stories about screw ups, people who just cannot for the life of them get it together. This book is full of stories like that. There are breakups, slackers, crummy jobs with weird bosses, drunkenness, breaking and entering, alien sightings, etc.

Every story in this collection sets up its characters for the real, human connection each of them desperately needs. Sometimes the characters connect, sometimes they screw it up. Such is life.

Had a blast with this collection of mostly very short stories. Highly recommend.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seibel is a master of observational humour, skillfully mining the everyday for the hilarious and the absurd. Nothing is off limits, no situation too ordinary or person too pedestrian to escape his rapier sharp wit. But there’s also a subtle gravitas and a genuine reverence for the human experience throughout his stories, and underneath all the funny stuff there is always an implicit understanding that he’s laughing with us and not at us.

[Julian Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hey You Assholes is gem after gem. It’s laugh-out-loud funny but sinks its hooks in you that way. Sardonic yet sincere, heartbreaking yet humane— see, I’m getting in my verbose bag. Kyle is so skilled at portraying the wants and needs of people— our excuses, our denials, our failures, our small victories. This collection is a masterclass in character, humor, pacing and more. Finding Kyle’s stories made me fall in love with fiction and I have no doubt that they’ll do the same for you.

[Ali Seibel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even if this book wasn't dedicated to me, I'd give it 5 stars. Before I met Kyle, the last book I read took me almost 5 years to finish. After I met Kyle and he helped me find the types of books that kept my ADHD brain interested long enough to finish, I can't STOP reading. His collection is one of those books. Having the privilege of seeing him go through the process of writing and sharing these short stories has been incredible.

As a recovering book-hater I can confidently say whether you're like me or already love books, you'll won't regret picking this one up.

[David Brehmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kyle Seibel's collection reads like if Salinger was a regular guy who spoke to people. A respectfully-sized, but elegantly crafted banner to comfort with wide-ranging humanity. A refreshing breeze with the occasional good-natured slap. I loved it.

[Nathaniel Duggan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of tightly crafted stories that succeed, in my opinion, on a technical level. Seibel takes the tradition of Carver and Chandler and makes it his own and makes it look easy, nailing everything from quick breezy flash pieces to meticulous longform narratives. I was most surprised and impressed by the book's commitment to sincerity. The post-internet era has allowed a surge of independent voices to be published, but with this has come a push toward the transgressive and edgy. What I find so refreshing about Hey You Assholes, then, is its commitment to a more grounded, traditional structure. Seibel often risks cliche with this approach. Despite the collection's brash title, many of these pieces have a moral focus to them (one story's climax is quite literally helping a little old lady cross the street), and I think in a less polished writer's hand they would fall flat, but Seibel commits to his sincerity so confidently I was sold. In a postmodernist scene drenched in defensive irony, Hey You Assholes is a rare rebellion and a worthy celebration of the short story form.

[Cody Shrum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kyle Seibel’s writing has this hilarious energy paired with precise language that I can only compare to Saunders. Every story is a ride (I dare say a roller coaster) that punches you in the gut in the end, yet you keep wanting to ride, eagerly awaiting the punch.

It’s one of those rare collections where you think you have a favorite story, then you remember the ten other stories that also left you saying “Damn, okay THAT one is my favorite.” That said, “Mr. Dubecki’s Secret Menu” is my fave, or maybe “Dumpster Cats.” Or wait, no it’s “Roller Coaster House.” No wait…

My favorite book of the year from one of our best short story writers, Hey You Assholes is a collection I’ll keep returning to for its humanity, its humor, its wit, and the damn good writing.

[Josh Rank · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. The stories have a wonderful mix of humor and heart that is just right in my sweet spot.

[jamison o'sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

kyle can do whatever he wants forever as long as he keeps writing things down for me to cry over a little

[KKUURRTT · Rating 5 out of 5]

Believe it.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quick, someone Men In Black mind-erase me so I can read this collection all over again for the first time. And keep doing it to me.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's so rare for me to read any fiction by straight men, and I will (reluctantly) say that I enjoyed it! I'm glad it was a collection of short stories, as I don't know if I would want to read a novel length narrative of any of these characters.

[Andrew Rivas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been waiting to read this one for a long time. I remember seeing the ARC with the red cover what feels like years ago, and hearing people say how awesome the book was, and now that I have it in my hands: they were right, and it was worth the wait.

HEY YOU ASSHOLES is: a collection of short stories; a collection of assholes; frequently laugh-out-loud funny but also sad in staccato; a catalog of assholes both explosive and quiet; full of the kind of secrets you keep to yourself—

HEY YOU ASSHOLES is full of assholes, but for the most part they are not evil (except for the asshole that painted the cat). You know these assholes. You are this asshole. You are friends (or formerly friends) with these assholes. HEY YOU ASSHOLES presents you with a mirror and in it you see: an asshole.

[Romy Rhoads Ewing · Rating 5 out of 5]

HYA is so smart and impossible not to love. Kyle is so incredibly fucking talented and reading this collection just solidified that I will never be 0.1% as funny as him. That being said, I have never felt a more compelling case for converting to writing fiction. I started marking each story that jumped out at me as a piece I was totally in love with in light pencil when I read each of them, since people I already knew would love this book were constantly popping into my mind. Gave up about ten stories in when I started marking up all of them. Read it in tiny chunks over an absurd amount of time simply because I didn't want this book to be over. I love nothing more than when a story makes me feel like I'm going to throw up from laughing so hard and then sneaks up on me and rips my heart out, and Kyle is a master of this. I will think of this perfect cast of freaks and jackasses often, probably forever. CLASH is the shit. Indie lit forever. The best thing I've read in some time.

[Nick Yonts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing collection of short stories with lovable and not so lovable characters. Highly recommend.

[Mitchell Duran · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished "Hey You Assholes," and man, jealous of what Mr. Seibel accomplished here. True, funny, and fucking weird, that kept me doing what so many books don’t - turn the page. A lot of short fiction tries to do too much or too little, but Kyle finds that sweet spot connecting his evident love for writing/words, his whole heart and humor, and his inner workings of weirdness to produce something original while being grounded in the form. Within "Hey You Assholes," you have whole worlds and scales of what felt like every side of humanity...getting up close and personal only to suddenly be thrust a million miles above it all. Take the time to read writers like Seibel. If not for the laughs but to witness and perhaps remember what it looks and feels like when somebody puts it all out there and says, fuck it.

[Erin Pickersgill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is like 5 course meal you have as a snack. There is so much to experience in each story. I had to remind myself that I would be drawn to love the most unlovable characters and wish the best for them. The writing is simple and profound, left me wondering about certain characters months after I met them in the book. 6 stars for Kyle Seibel’s debut book of short stories. If there’s anything America needs right now it’s the power of stories to show us nuance and delight.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listen! This book is filled with stories that will grab you right in the guts, that will make you laugh and maybe make you feel a little sad and maybe hit a little too close to home. Highly recommend to anyone who reads and who feels feelings.

[Nick Gregorio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Herein are stories like hysterical gut-punches. They’re playful and hilarious, but contain fathoms and fathoms and fathoms of depth. I literally said things like, “Fwooo, sweet bastard,” and “GodDAMN,” and “Ho-LEE shit” out loud/in public/poolside whilst reading this at a Mexican all-inclusive because that’s just how djee-dee stealthily Seibel caved in and subverted my expectations—often with a single sentence. Just excellent.

[AJ Cloutier · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It’s hard to tell because it’s loud and dark and I don’t know what’s happening, but then again, I never do, do I?”

Finished this hungover in the C terminal at Midway. Brain mostly off. Every closing sentence of every story punches you in the gut.

[Zach Zoeller · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s Bradford-esque oddball sleaze with the sharp heartache of a Carver or DJ. Been waiting on this one and, woof, did it match my expectations.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every so often, you come across a work of fiction that is so perfectly crafted and profoundly affecting that it sets off an emotional depth-charge right at the very core of your being, to the point whereby you can’t help but go right back to the beginning, caught in the thrall of the writer’s genius.

Well, in Kyle Seibel’s debut short story collection, "Hey You Assholes", we have a work of fiction which sets off thirty emotional depth-charges, thirty compulsions to delve straight back in again into each remarkably written and deeply emotive micro-narrative.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t the provocative and somehow hilarious title of the collection which attracted me to it in the first place; but then when I saw it was another publication from the ever-reliable, boundary-pushing, NY-based indie press, Clash Books, the deal was sealed.

Right from the get-go, Hey You Assholes sets its stall out with ‘Unfaithful Starring Richard Gere & What’s Her Name’ and signals what is to come: tightly-controlled stories of fleeting human connections; pop culture; dry humour; memory and melancholia; the past projecting into the future and the future reinterpreting the past; remorse and longing; nostalgia; the bad choices we make and how we can make amends.

It’s a beautiful opener, detailing a micro-interaction between a high school student working a shift at the local cinema and the mother-of-two of his contemporaries. It depicts a simple act of motherly love during a movie night, and ends with an image of the Capitol riots and a longing that that motherly love has achieved justice. And BOOM! goes the first depth-charge, your heart turning over in your chest. A song of innocence and experience.

But the story, like the others to follow, cleverly invite us to ask: so who is the asshole here?

Certainly the philandering ‘handsome Spaniard’ and certainly ‘What’s Her Name’, as they engage in the affair. Probably Richard Gere as he kills the Spaniard. But then he does confess, against the advice or his reconciled wife. Surely the mother can’t be the asshole, but then again, did she fail to see what was happening to her twins? The twins are obviously assholes, right, because of their insurrection? But what has led them to that? Maybe the usher is the asshole, certainly in adult life for naively thinking a noughties erotic thriller can be the bedrock of a philosophy of morality.

Or actually, maybe we are the assholes? Maybe Seibel is knocking off our caps, MAGA or otherwise, onto the ground and yelling, ‘HEY YOU ASSHOLES!’ – pay attention! Listen! Feel! Have compassion! Check in with our friends and neighbours! Don’t judge! It’s an exquisitely choreographed dance of language and symbolism which Seibel weaves through the entire collection.

‘Unfaithful Starring Richard Gere & What’s Her Name’ is also important in setting out another key trope of the book – the usher is a swim team drop-out, and throughout, we are presented with a smorgasbord of drop-outs, dreamers, divorcees, drunks, ne’er-do-wells, failures and bums.

For this reason, it’s inevitable, I guess, that Seibel will be compared to the likes of Bukowski or Carver. But I think this does the author a huge disservice, because whilst he captures the realities of living at the blue collar edgelands of society, there is a much deeper seam of humanity and helpless fallibility which runs through these stories. Often, these characters are simply trying their best, but coming up short – and we love them, warts and all. Rarely are these people inscrutably mean; even in the shortest of stories, Seibel, in what he writes and, vitally, leaves unwritten, we really ‘get’ these characters and their lives and loves and achievements and failures. Talking about ‘the unwritten’, Seibel is an absolute master craftsman at this. Take, for example, this moment in the remarkable ‘Rollercoaster House’ (a story about the tension between a married couple caused by the wife wanting to buy a house next door to a literal rollercoaster): ‘Looking for a place to park, my wife points out that the roads have recently been sealed. She pokes my shoulder. That thing with the potholes last year, she refuses to let it go’. I mean, I could probably write paragraphs about the genius of economy and precision in these sentences alone. But suffice to say, the doubling of the unsaid is impeccable – both the unsaid in how the wife brings up the contentious issue of the ‘pothole thing’, culminating in the shoulder-poke, but also the unsaid in how the narrator doesn’t actually tell us what ‘the pothole thing’ involved. It’s one of many, many moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity that occurs across the collection, but which helps, once more, to develop these very human characters, relationships and interactions.

Again, it is this deep humanity which, I think, separates Seibel from the emotional coolness (or, indeed, emotional brutality) so often present in the works of fellow chroniclers of the dispossessed, Bukowski and Carver. That being said, one thing Seibel does have in common, certainly with Carver, is his prodigious ability to craft the killer line, not least to close out his stories. And boy, does he give Carver a run for his money. I defy anyone finishing ‘Dirty Lincoln’ (chilling subtextual violence), ‘A New Kind of Dan’ and ‘At This Week’s Meeting of the Young Mountain Movers’ (devastating grief), ‘What Happens to Those Coyotes’ (heart-tugging nostalgia), ‘A Thin Layer of Frost on Old Decorations’ (the melancholia of lost love) and not feel their heart stop for a few seconds. And these are to name just a small proportion of the collection – those depth-charges just won’t stop going off.

But there’s also another string to Seibel’s impressively diverse bow: the surreal or the hyper-real: the aforementioned insistence on buying the ‘Rollercoaster House’; a Hellerian loophole of avoiding military action (‘Terminal Leave’); nefarious newlyweds (‘Newlyweds’); war-induced PTSD (‘Listening to Dinosaurs’); a teacher recruiting ex-students as character witnesses for a sexual misconduct tribunal (‘Mr. Bananaman’) – the list really does go on.

It is significant, I think, that after such a simple, naturalistic depiction of parenthood and the transgression of children in the collection opener, Seibel lays out his surreal sensibilities in the second story, ‘Third Shift, Mother Fucker’. It is a fantastically real portrayal of blue-collar grunt work, loading bread onto a bread van, while being harangued by a know-all, sadistic warehouse boss. But at its core, the action takes place around a dropped tray of bread (dropped, I hasten to add, because the Boss failed to heed the advice of his much shrewder ‘underlings’) and the huge ball of ‘breadsludge’ this evolves into, blocking the entrance of the warehouse. The story is also experimental in form, told in staccato sentences and blurts, separated by line-breaks, which creates a cacophony of competing voices, both internal and external, which perfectly encapsulates the energy of the scene and the reality of warehouse work. In this regard, Seibel, I would say, has much more in common with Richard Brautigan, making the natural unnatural and conjuring everyday, humdrum surrealism; and more in common, even, with Cheever, who was no stranger to surrealism, rather than Carver or Bukowski. In fact, in reading Hey You Assholes I was frequently reminded of Philip Roth’s description of Cheever’s style – his ‘enchanted realism’. And man, this is a great descriptor of Seibel’s writing. But so, too, is what Cheever said about his own writing, speaking to The Paris Review in 1976. He mused, ‘Acuteness of feeling and velocity have always seemed to me terribly important’ and it is clear from this collection that it is important to Seibel too. Because although Cheever (while understanding economic and socio-reputational loss -- his was a riches to rages to riches tale) predominately chronicled the white-collar communities of his fictional version of Westchester, he was always interested in dualities, failures, dreams and ambitions, the passing of time, the shadow of aging and death, reputational loss, hypocrisy, nostalgia and remorse.

These are the big themes, too, of "Hey You Assholes" (albeit within a largely blue-collar setting) as well as the trauma of war, drawing, inevitably perhaps, upon the author’s lived experience as a veteran. It is in these stories, understandably, where we find some of the most poignant, hard-hitting, complex stories of what it is to be human within extraordinary, earth-shifting circumstances. I simply cannot get out of my head, for example, Seibel’s description of a traumatised veteran, viewed through the eyes of a computer lab tutor (and ex-veteran) who sees an old pupil freshly back from war: ‘I’ll see what’s left of him is the EJ who put a boy in hospital in that football game and what’s gone is the part of him that could pet a bumblebee’ (‘Be Gentle’). It’s one of the most quietly devastating passages I’ve ever read, and a brutal observation of the human costs of war. Once more, I thought of another tenet of Cheever’s philosophy of writing: ‘Every sentence is an innovation’ (The Paris Review, 1976).

It is perhaps fitting, then, that the collection concludes with another, quite different depiction of military service and the lived experience of it: ‘Master Guns’, aptly named as it is a total masterpiece and exemplar of the flawless short story. It’s a deeply moving depiction of the claustrophobia of the US Navy, the friends you make and the friends you are forced to make and the micro-interactions that can shift your opinions of people and the world around you, even just a little bit. It really puts you through the ringer, and you run the whole gamut of emotions and interpretations and opinions of the characters who bump alongside each other within this snapshot of time and experience. And all the time you are reading, you are thinking – so who’s the asshole here again?

Now I’ve written a little over 1800 words to try and describe this elegant and impeccable immaculate collection and still don’t think I’ve done justice to how wonderful it is. So it is at times like this where I turn (unironically) to someone much better at the business of words than me: Raymond Carver.

In his introduction to Harvill’s publication of his selected short story collection, Where I’m Calling From (London, 1995), Carver describes the effect an exceptional short story should have on us. And Kyle Seibel’s Hey You Assholes contains, as previously mentioned, THIRTY exceptional short stories; THIRTY emotional depth charges.

And Carver’s words perfectly encapsulate the impact each of these stories have had on me:
‘If we’re lucky, writers and reader alike, we’ll finish the last line or two of a short story and just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we’ll ponder what we’ve just written or read; maybe our hearts or our intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we’ll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, “created of warm blood and nerves”, as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always Life.’

"Hey You Assholes" is chockful of life, of dynamism, of vitality.

And I cannot wait for what Kyle Seibel writes next…

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5. Laugh out loud funny at parts, but otherwise not sure I entirely got it

[Franco Romero · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is such a breath of fresh air. It reminds me of all the stories I read when I was first learning to love literature. Very human, funny, sad. Just wonderful. I know I love a book when I’m not paying attention to how fast I’m reading it. It doesn’t matter when I finish it, I just want to read the thing. This was like that. I got lost in it for a few days and, well, these days, getting lost in a story is all I really want from what I read.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been reading Kyle Seibel’s short stories for a while now but Hey You Assholes continuously floored me with how a character can be dissected and revealed, to an incredibly affecting extent, in just a few sentences. And as a little treat, said sentences are funny and beautiful as hell too