"F.P. Dorchak writes like a hot-rodder heading toward a brick wall. Edge of your seat entertainment! I pondered over each of these stories long after I'd finished reading them. That's what great writing is all about!" -Dean Wyant, Co-Founder, Hex Publishers
"A collection that folds upon itself like a Mobius strip. A twisted landscape of the humane, the weird, and the fantastic." -Mario Acevedo, Author, University of Doom
"Stylistically edgy and willing to muck around in the darker corners of life, the stories in Do The Dead Dream? are both bold and gritty. Readers looking to be soothed and reassured about the human condition, seek elsewhere." -Mark Stevens
Based totally on satire, Human Blight weaves four separate stories of the failed social experiment. The individuals characterized in these stories are some of the most repulsive, repugnant, and reprehensible people. Yet every one of their traits, actions, and methodologies is on display today in social media, news, and in print. Beginning with Al, the Racist, caught up in his past with the inability to change, he struggles with the world that has passed him by, and he knows not why or how. To Rod, the Opportunist, he’s driven by an insatiable need to dominate. If the world does not give him his oyster, he will concoct a way to get it himself. Followed by Kyle, the Activist, misguided and oblivious to the cause. Believing in what he does, but not understanding what it is that he is doing. And finally, Dodge, the Entitled, given all the advantages of wealth, privilege, and prominence, he is led by the basest of urges. Like a spoiled crying child in a crowded movie theater, he can only understand his need for satisfaction. All four men move through life with a narcissistic grace and an intolerance for rules that they believe do not apply to them. This allows them only to see the world through the lenses that they have created; lenses that reflect back their own warped and misshaped desires.
Inspired by the works of international artists, this Young Adult - New Adult collection of nineteen spellbinding magical realist, paranormal, slipstream, dark fantasy, alternate history, and fabulist tales (with a connecting novella) is collaboratively authored by Joe DiBuduo and Kate Robinson:
Peter John Rizzo, a 1960 graduate of Yale University’s journalism program, inherits a floundering art magazine from his uncle, John Rizzo, with the provision that he must increase the circulation or forfeit all assets to creditors.
Peter Rizzo, Pete’s father, is a banker who scorns careers in the Arts and Humanities, and is jealous of his late brother’s influence upon his wife and son.
Classic Art Exposé’s devoted but unorthodox editorial assistant, Jason, and two university interns, sisters Shirley and Evie, help Pete start a monthly short story contest with artwork prompts, hoping to expand and save the business.
As the four friends publish the winning (and sometimes disturbing) stories over the following eighteen months, Pete battles his father’s attempts to ruin his business and his reputation, and in the process, discovers a sordid family secret. What else could possibly go astray?
2018 Eric Hoffer / da Vinci Eye Finalist for excellence in cover art
2018 New Generation Book Award Finalist in the Young New Adult category
When you step off the train in Cadillac, Oklahoma, you'll wade through currents of hilarity and romance where the sheriff is in love with the wife of a prominent lawyer, and the banker's widow and a Las Vegas sex worker team up to beautify Cadillac.
Not until a young female reporter cracks open the self-satisfied surface of the town is the folly, anger, and pain revealed. The resentments of tree-huggers, storeowners, and the town fathers ignite over a proposal to create a New England-style town green in this water-starved former Dust Bowl town.
Citizens who don't care about town politics, deal with domestic abuse, religious rivalry and stale marriages. The sheriff, Jake Hale, seeks help from a retired lawyer, Sloane Willard, in an effort to save the life of a teenage girl accused of murdering the father who raped her.
The town's guiding forces of rule following, religion, and guns unite as a praying mass of church-goers overwhelm Jake's attempt to manage an out-of-control hostage situation at Cadillac's Youth Detention Center.
Before you get back on the train, you will have grown to love these people and their thirst for love, beauty, water and justice.
A modern woman adrift in modern China. Would-be lovers connected and separated by random chance. A drunken dissident and his less-then-happy minder. A researcher of war atrocities who must come to grips with her own family tragedies. A princess of a kingdom that no longer exists. Actors placed at the service of comedies and tragedies, depending on a filmmaker's whim... These are the characters that populate Ho Lin's short story collection China Girl.
In its nine tales, China Girl documents the collisions between East and West, the power of myth and the burden of history, and loves lost and almost found. The stories in this collection encompass everything from contemporary vignettes about urban life to fable-like musings on memories and the art of storytelling. Wide-ranging and playful, China Girl is a journey into today's Asia as well as an Asia of the imagination.
Most of the short stories in this collection are set in the south, places like Memphis, East Tennessee, North Mississippi,and Texas.
"These moving stories of characters struggling with their own flaws, fighting to right their tilted lives or survive a loved one's loss, are richly imagined, admirably complex, and shine with the subtlety and sensitivity of truly fine writing. But Early Men is more than that. By bravely grappling with the political as well as the personal, Britt Haraway tackles one of literature's most difficult, yet vital, roles and, with this debut, offers us important insights not only about ourselves, but about the wider world in which we live." -Josh Weil, author of The Great Glass Sea
"Writers aren't exactly people ... they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person." In Dennis Must's third story collection, Going Dark, the narrators mirror F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation by drawing the reader into their dissimilar yarns, earthy or exalted, practical or fanciful. An aging actor looks back on his life, but whose life does he recall? A couple finds a novel way to spice up their marriage, but then the fantasy takes on a life of its own .... Middle-aged men struggle to cope with distracted wives and terminal loneliness. They look back on hapless childhoods to come to terms with what drove their parents or siblings to suicide, infidelity, or madness. Post World War II Midwest is the predominant setting, and Must's poetic gift captures its moods, textures and odors and gives it form and substance in vivid colors and dramatic shades of gray. Their author has been variously compared to Franz Kafka, Flannery O'Connor, Nathaniel West, and Nathanial Hawthorne.
“Poignant, exquisite, and endlessly witty” —Kirkus Review (Starred Review)
“People—the species defies logic!” reflects the protagonist of one of the dazzling, intricate stories in Visitations. In this latest collection from Lee Upton, characters navigate often bewildering situations, from the homeschooled girl trying to communicate telepathically with an injured man she finds on the beach to the experimental theater troupe (called the Community Playas) composed primarily of actors the story’s narrator has wronged or been wronged by.
Upton’s stories frequently draw inspiration from books—books as art objects or lost objects, as inspiration or points of contention. “Night Walkers” tells the story of the world’s laziest book club, while “A Story’s End” follows a woman’s search for the last book read by her mother before her sudden death. Elsewhere, the ghosts of literature and writers past haunt the characters’ present: “The Tell-All Heart” sees a woman falling in love with Edgar Allan Poe’s discarded suit, and an unruly, unpredictable shadow creeps in a child’s window to demand that he cut off the other hand of Captain Hook in “A Shadow.”
In the surreal yet playful tradition of Karen Russell and George Saunders, Visitations brings together seventeen incandescent short stories from a writer at the height of her powers.
Fiction. This collection of "linked, rural-noir" stories depicts endangered humans in endangered environment. Jaimee Wriston Colbert has given us a story collection for our times. In WILD THINGS, Colbert's human characters face displacement, just like the tropical alligator who appears in New York's Susquehanna River. They face sheer desperation, like that of an ohia tree clinging to solid lava on a Hawaiian volcano. In an environment where good-paying factory jobs are an endangered species, Colbert's protagonists confront such post- industrial predations as meth, homelessness, and the ghosts of lost dreams. Their survival is their triumph.
Fiction. Amina Gautier's THE LOSS OF ALL LOST THINGS won the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award. It is a short story collection that illuminates the beauty that can be found in inconsolable loss. Gautier leads us through terrible reality but leaves us with the promise of hope and redemption. Contest judge, Phong Nguyen had this to say about it: "Literary fiction that grips us and won't let us go is notoriously rare. To offer us complex emotional experience and riveting narrative momentum, and then to leave the reader in contemplation of its sophisticated themes and subtle weave of objective correlatives... that is the stuff of literary greatness, of art that demands to be read in conversation with the canon...Gautier's stories have you by the throat, and they surprise you with their mercy."
