"Smart, stylish, and surprising, Of This New World is an inventive compendium of paradises lost. Starting with a married couple expelled from a certain unnamed garden, the collection charts the journeys of assorted outcasts, drifters, hippies, and astronauts as they set out to find their personal utopias, whether at an 'eco-revolution' boot camp in the Bahamas, a Shaker community in nineteenth-century America, or a colony on Mars. In stories that range fearlessly across space, time, and genre, Allegra Hyde keeps pursuing new variations on the collection's major theme. The result is an ambitious and memorable debut, in which a dozen different characters, looking for a dozen different paradises, all end up learning some customized version of that ultimate Miltonic lesson: 'the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.'"–Bennett Sims, 2016 judge, 2016 John Simmons Short Fiction Award