The stories in Middle Distance travel from the empty expanses of the southern ocean to the fall of a once great house, from the wharekai of a marae to the wasteland of Middle America. Longer than a traditional short story and shorter than a novella, the long story is a form that both compresses and sprawls, expands and contracts, and which allows us to inhabit a world in one sitting. The emerging and established writers in this anthology break new territory in character, setting and storytelling. Each of their stories reveals to us something – intimate, electrifying, funny, beautiful – that we won't soon forget. Middle Distance: Long Fiction of Aotearoa New Zealand is an anthology of new writing from VUP. It follows on from the success of Monsters in the Garden: An Anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy and, like it, is born out of the long-running literary magazine Sport.