Category: flash fiction

FICTION ON THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE

Those familiar with Tom Whalen’s writing will have already skipped this sentence and jumped to the “buy now” button below. For those who have yet to experience his short fictions, you’re in for a treat.

In Tom Whalen’s Grand Equation ants make their way to the edge of the universe, an old doll rocks her nights away in the attic of an abandoned theater shop, “delivery trucks rumble up from the earth,” flies “feast off the flytrap of the sky,” a room falls in love with its inhabitant, and a man gives birth to a puppet. Populating the whole are troubled old men, grandmothers, a green man and priests, as well as dolls, mice, prose poets, and other fabular fauna. Drawn from Whalen’s work in the field over the past five decades, the sixty-seven prose poems and micro-fictions of The Grand Equation are comic, surreal, philosophical, disquieting and, as John Taylor commented in Michigan Quarterly Review on Whalen’s “Why I Hate the Prose Poem,” “particularly subtle.”

Reading Tom Whalen’s Grand Equation, I am reminded of my early years of writing prose poetry and reading the great masters of the form including Baudelaire, Jacob, Edson, Tate, and Simic. Like the great prose poets before him, Whalen’s work is startling, witty, surreal, and metaphysical. He uses the form to enchant and to entertain, to describe other worlds and offer new windows onto this one. His images, parables, and insights make the absurd seem ordinary and vice versa. And remind me that the world is not as I imagine it to be, and neither am I. This is a collection to ponder, savor and return to. 

—NIN ANDREWS, author of The Last Orgasm

THE GRAND EQUATION
Prose Poems and Micro-Fictions
Tom Whalen
$14.95 paperback
ISBN 979-8-9859996-8-6

Tom Whalen’s short prose has appeared in Great American Prose Poems, Sudden Fiction, An Introduction to the Prose Poem, The Best of the Prose Poem, A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly, Unscheduled Departures, The Party Train and other anthologies. His two selections and translations of short prose by Robert Walser — Girfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories and Little Snow Landscape — are published with NYRB Classics. His novel The Straw That Broke and collection April Fireball: Early Stories are both available from Black Scat.

TODAY!!

Today is the day Debra Di Blasi‘s cutting-edge alternative fictions flash before our eyes. This provocative new collection reveals our secret lives on social media — exposes the code behind our narcissistic sexting & selfies with feral wit. Indeed, this book is a savage bible defining our digital existence, here & now. Today.

TODAY is the day of resurrection and death in the NEW AMERICA. TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR DEBRA DI BLASI:

Debra Di Blasi’s TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER is a fierce and real-time live-stream pastiche that inhabits voices and points-of-view of our new “American” multitude. Terrifyingly sincere and aching with loss one moment, angry, cruel, even bigoted the next, Di Blasi’s anti-Whitmanian universe expands and collapses into every imaginable corner of what our world has become, to salvage true moments out of this white noise at the penetralia of our virtual hornet’s nest, in which bodies have somehow come alive, “crawled right out of the trashbin of history into the light of public office.”  How it smokes and hums with danger! Readers beware: This hilarious and moving book is not a safe space.—Sam Witt, author of Little Domesday Clock

No one else writes about the current social climate with the badass gusto of Debra Di Blasi. No one! Politically incorrect, seriously playful, often shocking, incorrigible in all the right ways, self-indicting, yet devastatingly human, Di Blasi’s prose grabs contemporary culture by the throat and holds on in a dazzling stranglehold where the “I” of the shitstorm is “you.” -Aimee Parkison, author of Refrigerated Music far a Gleaming Woman

Will the world end with a whimper or a bang? Debra Di Blasi’s TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER gives us a compelling third option: It will end in a whir of pronouncements, gossip, apologies, braggadocio, and the rest of the nonstop human noise we call culture. In 138 very short fictions ranging from the TV show “Chopped” to a pig farm, a magazine in a doctor’s waiting room and the fantasies of a college professor, Di Blasi’s compressed prose and linguistic play result in a jack-in-the-box kind of release found in good poetry. This is a writer in full control of language, from regional idiom to scientific jargon. “I wish to speak of things that are not I” says a character in one story, even as the character in another acts out the wish for permeability “I stuck my finger inside. Something bled. I’m sure it was you.” Despite our desire to escape the metaphysical and envi­ronmental catastrophes we’ve long wrought by now flirting with the concept of a human-robot future, Di Blasi reminds us elegantly and fero­ciously exactly where our human actions have placed us. -Leslie McGrath, author of Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives

Today Is the Day That Will Matter: An Oral History of the New America: #AlternativeFictions
by Debra Di Blasi
Trade paperback, 150 pages, $12.95

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