Super Shorts is a collection of stories and monologues in the superhero genre. Author M. Kelleher started writing them during the pandemic while coming to terms with and processing some big changes to her family, many of which stemmed from the men in her life playing out characters mired in the idea of American masculinity.
 
These short stories represent a search for understanding and empathy. Some are dark, some are funny, but Kelleher hopes that even when they’re bleak, as a collection they leave the reader feeling that there is room for reflection and growth.
 
Approx 60 pages
Paperback
To be published: November 10, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-90214-221-8
 
About the Author
 
M. Kelleher is a speculative fiction writer and theater artist currently living in New Orleans, LA. She has over twenty years of experience helping to tell stories as a Stage Manager and Lighting Designer in New York (where she’s from) and New Orleans (where she lives with her wife). Her work has been published in Cosmic Horror Monthly, the Dread Mondays anthology, and she is the vice president and director of programming for the non-profit literary collective Third Lantern Lit. 
 
Praise for Super Shorts
"M. Kelleher takes us into the psyches of superheroes and villains past their prime, facing the biggest threat of their lives: the mundane. The result is an engaging, hilarious, and relatable collection of stories that explore what it's like when we've lost power, when the mask comes off, and the world is reshaped around us. Toxic Ruminations shows us that even when our story changes, we don't have to lose our punch."
— T.Q. Sims, author of Godspeed, Lovers 
"From a twelve-step group for superheroes to a look behind the scenes of a super-criminal enterprise, and an aging superhero who’s lost his powers to a hero able to create pocket dimensions, M. Kelleher's super short stories consider not just heroes and hero-dom, but villains and everyday citizens, too, with humor and surprising pathos. These stories will make you laugh out loud and think and feel. You’ll never look at superheroes—or humanity—the same way again."
 — Timothy Boudreau, author of Love You, Miss You, Goodbye Forever
 
"The superhero has always been fundamentally human, simply struggling with an oversized double-edged sword of empowerment and burden. M. Kelleher’s new collection reminds me a little of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol run, or Publick and Hammer’s The Venture Bros. in this way. It’s less zany, its humor more muted and deadpan, its examinations a little more sobering as it addresses the subtle psychological toll of literal masking, or the addiction to supernatural abilities as though they were an opioid that never left your bloodstream. But it speaks to the same relatable failure and the absurdity of existence in ways that are similarly deeply felt. A wonderful counterargument to the idea that hero media must be shallow escapism." 
— Travis Shosa