I Carry a Hammer in My Pocket for Occasions Such as These

I Carry a Hammer in My Pocket for Occasions Such as These

Author: Anthony Tognazzini

Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 9781929918904

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"Reading Anthony Tognazzini is like having a surprise party thrown in your honor on every page. I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These turns cartwheels, plants daisies, and sings love songs in honor of all that is strange, sad, serious, and sublime about being alive."--Myla Goldberg, author of Bee Season I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These is a collection of fifty-seven pieces that range in length from compressed paragraphs to ten-page stories. Characters, voices, and surreal scenarios are unified in a playful vision of the world sustained by metaphor, memory, cartoon, tragedy, love story, and song. Speed and brevity are a large part of the collection's design. In a culture where attention spans are shorter and more fractured, the need for a literature for the subway and the waiting room--something to resonate in the smaller gaps of our lives--is emerging. To this end, I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These is quick, colloquial, and comic, yet challenges readers to think. It offers--at a glance--a journey into a fictional world that is poetic and narrative, fantastic and familiar, accessible and adventurous. "The Difference" Although I was never an early riser, my father always counseled me to rise with the sun. "Early bird gets the worm!" he told me. "Sure," I said, "but the worm who sleeps late, lives." Anthony Tognazzini lives in New York City, where he makes his living as a teacher and freelance journalist. His awards include an AWP Award, an Academy of American Poets prize, a Greer Artist Foundation Fellowship, and a Hemingway Fellowship.


New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction

New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction

Author: James Thomas

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2018-08-28

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 0393354717

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A new collection of very short stories selected by Flash Fiction editor James Thomas and Robert Scotellaro. All of the stories in this book are exceptionally short, revealing themselves in no more than 300 words. With a foreword by Robert Shapard and an afterword by Christopher Merrill, this book brings you fresh approaches to an exacting form that demands precision, a species of brevity that is surprisingly expansive. Writers say the pieces are hard to compose, but readers say they are easy to appreciate, a pleasure to envision, a wonder to watch life spun out and painted in small places. Real and surreal, lyrical and prosaic, here are 135 stories by 89 authors, certain to make you think.


This New & Poisonous Air

This New & Poisonous Air

Author: Adam McOmber

Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.

Published: 2011-06-21

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 1934414794

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She admits she is pleased when the new placard is raised, "Madame Tussaud's House of Wax." She stands in the crowd with François at her side. He leans close enough to touch her ear with the fringe of his mustache and whispers, "What part of the museum would the famous Madame Tussaud like to survey on her inaugural visit?" "The Chamber of Horrors, I think," she says softly. "Really, my dear? All that grim fantasy and blood?" "There is no fantasy about it, François. It is an embryo, a showing of what is to come." Blending historical fiction with fantasy and the macabre, Adam McOmber's debut short story collection brings the influence of Angela Carter, Isak Dinesen, and Edgar Allan Poe to the next generation. In "The Automatic Garden," a solitary architect from the court at Versailles builds a water-powered pleasure garden; in "There Are No Bodies Such as This," we read a haunted and romantic fiction about the creation of Madame Tussaud's wax museum; in "Fall, Orpheum," a small town movie palace becomes the temple for an entire town's devotion and sacrifice. McOmber seamlessly blends history, artifice, and desire to create a dream of the past that intertwines with our own notions of modern life. Adam McOmber's stories appear in Conjunctions, StoryQuarterly, Third Coast, The Greensboro Review, Arts & Letters, and Quarterly West. He is assistant director of creative nonfiction at Columbia College Chicago and associate editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika.


My House Gathers Desires

My House Gathers Desires

Author: Adam McOmber

Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.

Published: 2017-08-21

Total Pages: 102

ISBN-13: 1942683421

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Adam McOmber's lush, hallucinatory stories are both familiar and wholly original. Drawn from the historical record, Biblical lore, fairy tales, science fiction, and nightmares, these offbeat and fantastical works explore gender and sexuality in their darkest and most beautiful manifestations. In the tradition of Angela Carter or Kelly Link, My House Gathers Desires is covertly funny and haunting, seeking fresh ways to consider sexual identity and its relation to history. In "Sodom and Gomorrah," readers encounter a subversive, ecstatic new version of the Old Testament story. In "The Re'em," a medieval monk's search for a mythic beast conjures forbidden desire. And in "Notes on Inversion," the German psychiatrist Kraft-Ebbing receives a surreal retort to his clinical descriptions of same-sex desire. From "Sodom and Gomorrah": The strangers then are no longer like two men at all. They have undressed themselves, giving up the pretense of skin and becoming a denser part of the air. We are hungry for them. Ours is a sacred desire that was buried too long in our chests, like some city beneath the sand. Adam McOmber is the author of The White Forest (Touchstone, 2012) and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA, 2011), from which he had stories nominated for two 2012 Pushcart Prizes. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, and Fairy Tale Review. He served as the managing and associate editor of Hotel America at Columbia College Chicago from 2007-2015. He now lives in Los Angeles, CA, where he teaches at Loyola Marymount University.


The Science of Lost Futures

The Science of Lost Futures

Author: Ryan Habermeyer

Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.

Published: 2018-05-08

Total Pages: 147

ISBN-13: 1942683618

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The Science of Lost Futures is a prize-winning collection full of quirky humor and intelligent absurdity. Ryan Habermeyer is a yarn spinner of the first order. Drawing on urban legends, internet hoaxes, and ancient medical folklore, these stories go beyond science fiction and magical realism to create a captivating collection of fabulist stories that revel in the alien and the absurd.


The Education of a Poker Player

The Education of a Poker Player

Author: James McManus

Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.

Published: 2015-10-19

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 193816086X

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"In writing about poker Jim McManus has managed to write about everything, and it's glorious."—David Sedaris New York Times-bestselling author James McManus offers up a collection of seven stories narrated by Vincent Killeen, an Irish Catholic altar boy, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Persuaded at age eight by his grandmother that entering the priesthood will guarantee salvation for every member of his family, Vince eagerly commits to attending a Jesuit seminary for high school. As the meaning of a vow of celibacy becomes clearer to him, however, and he is exposed to the irresistible temptations of poker and girls, life as a seminarian begins to seem less appealing. These autobiographical stories are enlightening and evocative, providing keen, often humorous insight into Catholicism, faith, celibacy and its opposite, as well as America's—and increasingly the world's—favorite card game. James McManus has been called "poker's Shakespeare." He is the New York Times-bestselling author of Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker and Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, among others. He has been the poker columnist for the New York Times and currently writes the history column for CardPlayer. His work has also appeared in Harper's, The Believer, Paris Review, Esquire, and in Best American anthologies for poetry, sports writing, science and nature, and magazine writing. He has spoken about poker at Yale, Harvard, Google, Goldman Sachs, and on numerous media outlets, and is the recipient of the Peter Lisagor Award for Sports Journalism and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among other awards. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.


Jewelry Box

Jewelry Box

Author: Aurelie Sheehan

Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.

Published: 2013-09-09

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 1938160258

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Jewelry Box is a collection of intimate histories, concentrated renderings of getting older, leaving, remembering. Here, “history” is twinned with “story,” where microcosms of daily life, drenched in the past, blossom from objects: a tube of mascara, a cat’s tail, mushroom paté. This collection explores nuances of sexuality, motherhood, and what it means to know life and tell a story.


Gravity Changes

Gravity Changes

Author: Zach Powers

Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.

Published: 2017-05-22

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 1942683383

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Gravity Changes is a collection of fantastical, off-beat stories that view the quotidian world through the lens of the absurd. Set in a surreal fictional world that is populated by strange characters—children who defy gravity, a man who marries a light-bulb, the Devil and his miracle-worker wife—these stories take wide steps outside of reality, finding new ways to illuminate truth.


An Orchard in the Street

An Orchard in the Street

Author: Reginald Gibbons

Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.

Published: 2017-09-18

Total Pages: 91

ISBN-13: 1942683502

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This new collection by award-winning author Reginald Gibbons explores human experience and memory in ordinary settings—city apartments, rural roads, soap operas, and juvenile court—as way to understand the depths of thought and feeling in our everyday encounters. These narrative meditations explode with imagery, looking and listening deeply into our everyday experience—the extraordinary within the ordinary, the impossible within the possible. Reginald Gibbons is the author of numerous collections of poetry and fiction. His book Creatures of a Day was a poetry finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Evanston, IL, where he teaches at Northwestern University.


The Tao of Humiliation

The Tao of Humiliation

Author: Lee Upton

Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.

Published: 2014-04-21

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 1938160339

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Alternately chilling, funny, devastating, and hopeful, these twenty stories introduce us to a theater critic who winds up in a hot tub with the actress he routinely savages in reviews; a biographer who struggles to discover why a novelist stopped writing; a woman who searches through her past lives to recall a romantic encounter with the poet W. B. Yeats; a student who contends with her predatory professor; and the poignant scenario of the last satyr meeting his last woman. Writer-in-residence and a professor of English at Lafayette College, Lee Upton is author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.