Abruptions: 3 Minute Stories to Awaken the Mind
Abruptions: 3 Minute Stories to Awaken the Mind

Author: Jack Matthews

Publisher: Personville Press

Published: 2017-10-11

Total Pages: 123

ISBN-13:

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"Matthews stories are like friends from small towns: They are honest, warm, occasionally lyrical and as strange and idiosyncratic as the rest of us." Arthur Sabatini During the last decade of his life, author Jack Matthews wrote a series of 1-2 page prose pieces (which he dubbed "Abruptions" or "very short stories that end abruptly"). Matthews had already published over 20 books of fiction with an astonishing variety of characters and plots. This last volume hints at a lot of characters and plots without trying to resolve them. Each abruption -- which rarely takes more than 5 minutes to read -- shed light on something unexpected, whether it be a character's view on life or the reader's notions of how the world ought to work. Many episodes read like contemporary fables or sketches of quirky people from small midwest towns. Two older women have a long-running feud about what flowers should go on the fence between their houses. An actor makes a living out of playing the bad Nazi in movies. An owner of a movie studio in the 1930s throws out any audience member who misbehaves during a movie. An office worker is distracted by a pretty woman washing the outside windows. Other stories sound like wild fairy tales. What if one superintelligent Siamese twin were conjoined with an idiot brother? What if a witch's curse caused every third word uttered by a person to go unsaid? What if a woman has terrifying dreams about a missing watch? Some stories simply ponder the imponderable. Why do certain memories persist or reappear? Why do elderly people become set in their ways? Why do people become blind to certain things? Matthews explains in the book's preface that abruptions "can reach down to dimensions of wonder and speculation that are commonly thought to be the proper domain of poetry." These stories are a fitting coda for Matthew's career as a storyteller. As deep and dark as these abruptions can become, they are told with simple language, flashes of humor and a sage's sense of wonder and irony.

Hanger Stout, Awake!: 50th Anniversary Edition
Hanger Stout, Awake!: 50th Anniversary Edition

Author: Jack Matthews

Publisher: Personville Press

Published: 2012-03-20

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13:

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Clyde Stout is a high school graduate in a small Ohio town; he loves tinkering with cars and dreaming about his girlfriend. He is coasting ... until he discovers he has a new talent: the ability to hang from a metal bar longer than anybody! Others start calling him "Hanger," and an out-of-town stranger, trying to help the boy to profit from this talent, organizes various "hanging competitions." At first, Hanger goes along, but after a while he becomes suspicious of the stranger’s motives; is he for real? Hanger is no longer a boy and not yet an adult – but he finds himself in a world where older adults are constantly offering advice and supervision and alleged wisdom. Until then, Hanger had always been an amiable and trusting sort; now Hanger needs to look at things through adult eyes — can he adapt to a world which seems less safe or reliable but possibly more profound? This slender 150 page coming-of-age novella was first published in 1967 and reprinted several times. Now, in celebration of its 50th anniversary, it is available as an ebook. TIME MAGAZINE described it as a "gentle first novel told with a fine ear for adolescent patois," and National Book Award winning poet William Stafford called it one of the most neglected works of the 20th century. Southern novelist Eudora Welty said about the book: “I like it, and warmly admire his sturdy subject and delicately restrained treatment. It seemed to me blessed with honesty, clarity, directness, proportion and a lovely humor. . . .” The book is a fun and easy read… Not too much seems to happen in the novel, and the protagonist (we’re sorry to report) is not a werewolf or vampire or time traveler or wizard or superhero; to all appearances, he’s just an ordinary guy, but if you penetrate beneath appearances, you’ll find that he’s defiantly and unforgettably unique. This book will help you remember how it felt to be a teenager…before you needed to start worrying about more serious matters. Like life, or what passes for life in the world of adults. This 50th anniversary edition includes an introductory essay, "Hanger at 50 Years: A Rumination" by Robert Nagle. "Here is a contemporary character so rich in innocence, he seems a hybrid descendant of Candide and Don Quixote ... Hanger Stout stays in your memory, hanging on, as only a Champion can, for a long, long time." (Laurie Levy, CHICAGO TRIBUNE) "The author has created a true American original in the line of Huckleberry Finn, Penrod Schofield, Plupy Shute and Dink Stover as the hero of one of the best novels of this or any other recent year." (Ernest Cady, COLUMBUS DISPATCH)." "In an automobile graveyard of human possibilities, using all the strengths of realism and none of its cliches, Jack Matthews presents a deeply original novel. I think it is tremendous." (J. Michael Yates, MUNDUS ARTIUM) . "... charming, delightful and thoroughly readable novel." (Gregor Roy, CATHOLIC WORLD). "...a superb novel which must be read before it is read about." (Day Thorpe, WASHINGTON STAR ). "Introducing from the tree limb on the left, the hangingest hanging man in the country, Clyde Stout. Sound like a wiggy field event? It started when Mr. Comisky drove into the station to have his car fixed. But it's Clyde's story, told in diary form and he's one of the most charming, congenial characters met in years. Clyde isn't too intelligent but he's smart. He's also in-cred-ibly naive, innocence personified. A delightful notion of a book. Hang in there boy." KIRKUS REVIEW

Three Times Time
Three Times Time

Author: Jack Matthews

Publisher: Personville Press

Published:

Total Pages: 111

ISBN-13:

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A year before he died, Jack Matthews (author of 10 story collections and over 30 books) was asked to suggest his 3 favorite stories from all his books for this story sampler. "Amos Smith, the Gunsmith" reaches into the folk tale tradition to produce a nice allegory about human labor. "A Woman of Properties" is a satirical suburban tale (reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor or Cheever) about a real estate agent with a grudge. "The Girl at the Window" is an unsettling and mysterious tale about our relationship to the past. Also included is an extended interview the author gave about the craft of writing in 2009. During his career as a writer, Mr. Matthews was distinguished professor of Fiction Writing at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio for over 4 decades. Winner of Guggenheim and several arts grants, Matthews has been anthologized widely, translated into several languages and nominated for a National Book Award. His own books have been praised by Eudora Welty, Anthony Burgess, Shirley Ann Grau, Tim O’Brien, Doris Grumbach, Walker Percy and a host of other famous and highly accomplished authors. "Mr. Matthews is a master of prose conversation and deadpan charm. He is ironic, cool, and shrewd, and he writes a lucid prose." (Tom O'Brien, New York Times) "Matthews' always graceful prose finds that precise telling detail. It's easy to fall in love with such writing." (Perry Glasser, North American Review) "Engaging wit and irony have been characteristic of Matthews's writing from the start, and both are strongly present in his latest gatherings of stories. His irony is increasingly darker, however, and his characters' obsession with memory and its distortions plays a more dominant role in this later work, much of which deals with death. For the most part, these are stories with deceptively simple and ordinary surfaces, but they are driven by powerful and ominous undercurrents, which often fuse the local and regional with the archetypal. Few can do it better. Without question, Matthews has established himself as one of America's finest storytellers." (Stanley Lindberg, editor, Georgia Review)

Boxes of Time: Stories
Boxes of Time: Stories

Author: Jack Matthews

Publisher: Personville Press

Published: 2024-01-12

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13:

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Stories about messy emotions, troubled families and damaged personalities. 11th Story Collection. Over his lifetime Jack Matthews (1925-2013) wrote over 200 stories, many of which were published in literary journals. Although stories varied widely in subject and style, they often could be described as urbane, philosophical, poetic and sardonic. Stories in Boxes of Time were mostly published between 1961 and 1981; they feature characters who are troubled or unsure of themselves trying to deal with life's usual disappointments. Stylistically, these stories are polished and carefully written, but they deal with messy emotions, troubled families and damaged personalities. The characters may not be as educated or self-assured as the people in his other collections, but they still manage to figure out interesting things about themselves and the people around them. Stories from this period focus especially on the emotional stresses that separate parents from their children. This ebook contains 24 stories by Jack Matthews which have never been collected, making it the author's largest story collection. _______ "Matthews stories are like friends from small towns: They are honest, warm, occasionally lyrical and as strange and idiosyncratic as the rest of us." (Arthur Sabatini, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) "Mr. Matthews is a master of prose conversation and deadpan charm. He is ironic, cool, and shrewd, and he writes a lucid prose." (Tom O'Brien, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)

Second Death of E.A. Poe and Other Stories
Second Death of E.A. Poe and Other Stories

Author: Jack Matthews

Publisher: Personville Press

Published: 2021-11-15

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13:

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Did Edgar Allen Poe fake his death? That’s what a Baltimore doctor needs to figure out in the title tale for this 11th story collection by Jack Matthews. As one critic wrote, “Matthews stories are like friends from small towns: They are honest, warm, occasionally lyrical and as strange and idiosyncratic as the rest of us.” Characters face all kinds of improbable situations in this collection. A US army battalion finds itself locked in an absurd stalemate with German troops at the end of World War Two. A second-string college football player inexplicably receives an athletic prize. A middle-aged man discovers that random women around his neighborhood are walking around nude. A man witnesses a car falling out of the sky into a supermarket parking lot. A book collector and his wife concoct a mad plan to outbid a mysterious competitor for a 17th century manuscript. In the novella-sized title story, Edgar Allen Poe’s doctor investigates the mystery of Poe’s disappearance from his deathbed and the very real possibility that Poe (or someone purporting to be him) has fled to Louisiana and been sending enigmatic clues. As author of several novels set in 19th century America (Gambler’s Nephew, Sassafras and Soldier Boys), Jack Matthews (1925-2013) writes about early America with gusto and insight. In contrast to previous story collections (which lean more to the cerebral or poetic), the Matthews stories collected here are down-to-earth yarns: gently satirical and reminiscent of John Cheever’s fiction. Most are like pleasant strolls through Midwestern neighborhoods, glimpsing random people at backyard parties, cafes and parking lots.

Soldier Boys: Tales of the Civil War
Soldier Boys: Tales of the Civil War

Author: Jack Matthews

Publisher: Personville Press

Published: 2016-04-04

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13:

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Over the decades, Jack Matthews collected memoirs and personal correspondence by actual U.S. Civil War soldiers. Eventually this interest led him to write a group of stories from the vantage point of teenage soldiers. The stories are less about specific Civil War battles or the horrors of war than about ordinary adventures and heartbreaks of young soldiers. One soldier constantly composes new epitaphs for himself (much to the irritation of his comrades). A wounded soldier finds himself abandoned by his regiment and accidentally strikes up a friendship with a soldier from the other side. One soldier starts seeing ghostly visions of his dead brother and wants to know why. In the opening story, a courier is sent by headquarters to deliver an urgent (and tragic) message only to learn that the local commander has forbidden him to deliver it. In the final story, two soldiers have to hunt down and stop a hidden sharpshooter nicknamed “Old Mortality” and in so doing have to face (and understand) their fears. Told in an accessible, humorous and even old-fashioned way, these stories have a philosophical bent and give readers a sense of how 19th century young Americans must have pondered their world. This 8th story collection (published posthumously) is the first Jack Matthews story collection to be published in 23 years. This special ebook edition is illustrated by Barbiel Matthews-Sanders (the author’s daughter) and includes two introductory essays by Personville editor Robert Nagle. The author’s website (www.ghostlypopulations.com ) also contains a study guide for teachers and an annotated bibliography of Civil War fiction prepared especially for this ebook.

A Worker's Writebook: How Language Makes Stories
A Worker's Writebook: How Language Makes Stories

Author: Jack Matthews

Publisher: Personville Press

Published: 2011-04-12

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13:

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This quirky writing guide by Jack Matthews (author of 20 literary works) offers insight about how successful writers mold raw experiences into a story and how language helps you to do that. Erudite, witty, idiosyncratic, serendipitous, mischievous, sesquipedalian, entertaining, introspective and colorful: these are adjectives which come to mind when reading this book. Less For several decades Jack Matthews distributed a photocopied version of this guide to students in his fiction writing classes at Ohio University. A Worker's Writebook offers insight about how successful writers mold raw experiences into a story and how language helps you to do that. It offers good examples and practical advice for getting a story idea off the ground; it analyzes several stories (including one of Matthews’ own) and offers paradigms for understanding how stories work. Erudite, witty, idiosyncratic, serendipitous, mischievous, sesquipedalian, entertaining, introspective and colorful: these are adjectives which come to mind when reading this book. The book consists of essays and dialogue (called interludes). These interludes punch holes in the rules and pronouncements made in the essays; they also help the book avoid seeming too dogmatic. The two voices in the interludes are not exactly "characters" but the author and a contrarian voice within the author. The comparison to Platonic dialogues is apt; Matthews received his undergraduate degree in classical Greek literature and has always found echoes of the classical age in contemporary art and life. Still, the "poetics" of Writebook is grounded less in Aristotle than Aristophanes. Although Writebook touches upon practical aspects of writing fiction (such as naming characters and writing speech cues), it focuses on helping the writer to write more boldly and with more attention to the linguistic vehicles of thought. For Matthews, most stories fail through under-invention, not because the rules of narrative have been disregarded. Chapter 2 (Taxonomies) and 3 (Structural Matters) cover paradigms for plot and character development. These are worthy subjects and Matthews has interesting things to say (especially when he tries to analyze his story Funeral Plots with these same paradigms). At the same time Matthews recognizes that there is no magic paradigm or archetype capable of explaining what makes all stories successful – these are just guides. At some point you just have to trust writerly intuition. Writebook helps the potential storyteller to cultivate this intuition and be flexible enough to bend rules when necessary. Matthews writes, "Anything can be done if it's done in the right way: with style, panache and cunning." At another time, he wrote, "Literature is the least pure of all the arts, and that is its richness and power. It's a temporal art like a symphony; it has periodicities, it has rhythms - prose itself has sound, it evokes visual imagery like painting...." Many writing books include a chapter or two listing literary cliches to avoid. For the most part, Writebook doesn't do that. Instead it goes deeper and analyzes why some metaphors succeed and others do not. The funny "Parable of the Indifferent Ear" provides a good case study about how linguistic inventiveness doesn't always translate into effective writing. Literary insights from Writebook can be applied to drama, novels and poetry; but they are especially applicable to smaller forms like the short story (though Matthews' claim that a short story of more than 10,000 words rarely succeeds is sure to be controversial). Writebook introduces lots of new ideas and terminology: the non-sequential time opening, the Swamps of Antecedence, pointedness (which is how stories gain enough momentum to escape the gravitational pull of the author), linguistic vehicles (the actual words which transport the thought) and why flat characters aren't always bad. "Mr. Matthews is a master of prose conversation and deadpan charm. He is ironic, cool, and shrewd, and he writes a lucid prose." (Tom O'Brien, NEW YORK TIMES) "Matthews' always graceful prose finds that precise telling detail. It's easy to fall in love with such writing." (Perry Glasser, NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW)

Minor Sketches and Reveries
Minor Sketches and Reveries

Author: Alberto Balengo

Publisher: Personville Press

Published: 2020-11-01

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13:

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These introspective tales (described by one critic as "the perfect panacea for minds stressed by life's challenges") feature animals, allegories and melodramas of everyday life. At the center of the stories are tiny creatures (a sparrow, earthworm or paperclip) struggling to make sense of larger mysterious forces. Human protagonists are equally perplexed by ordinary events - like searching for a lost key, watching late night TV, or eating a taco. As the author admits in the afterward, these pieces feel more like "sketches" than stories with conventional plot and character. Many end at odd places or don't end at all. Scattered through the stories are moments of isolation, confusion and foreboding. Some pieces (like the essayistic "Indolence: Notebooks") investigate a philosophical idea to such absurd lengths that one is almost tempted to take a nap. In one of the lighter pieces ("3 Fake Recommendation Letters,") Balengo submits fake recommendation letters (by Rabelais, Kafka and Hans Christian Anderson) to an MFA program. In a more somber story ("The Deletionist") a disgruntled system administrator tries to delete as much of his digital footprint as he can - with mixed results. Written in plain, careful language, this debut collection by Alberto Balengo depicts people (and creatures) trying valiantly to investigate a world that seems neither rational nor reassuring.

Pre-Pulitzer Poetry
Pre-Pulitzer Poetry

Author: Robert Hillyer

Publisher: Personville Press

Published: 2023-12-30

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13:

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Before winning the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Robert Hillyer (1895-1961) explored a variety of subjects and poetic forms in his books. This new poetry collection contains six of Hillyer's pre-Pulitzer books in their entirety, including a longer narrative poem (Carmus) that is a haunting fairy tale for adults with beautiful imagery and sentences. Hillyer was classmates with E.E. Cummings at Harvard and became lifelong friends with Robert Frost (who said that he and Hillyer had been "running side-by-side all these years, and he knows that I think of his poetry as he thinks of mine: with affection ... (and) ... admiration." While poets of Hillyer's era were flirting with modernism, imagism and symbolism, Hillyer was working with sonnets and pastorals, mostly rejecting free verse and the "existential agonies of modern man" in order to write about eternal themes like nature, love and death. Hillyer was not really an innovator. Hillyer felt most comfortable writing sonnets and other constricted forms with meter and rhyme, and his poems rarely sounded artificial or stilted. Although occasionally the poems used allusions to art and history and mythology, the poems mostly remained accessible and didn't require elaborate footnotes. This ebook edition also contains illustrations by Beatrice Stevens and two books of translations: a collection of Danish poetry and an improved translation in verse of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It also includes an essay about Robert Hillyer's poetry by horror writer Arthur Machen and an essay that Hillyer wrote comparing Egyptian religion with Christianity. Recently Personville Press republished Hillyer's 1942 poetic novel My Heart for Hostage (which evokes Hillyer's experiences of living in Paris after WWI and presents a coherent aesthetic sensibility for a lyrical novel). This sensibility is apparent in his poems as well. Critics Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska said that the "gift that Hillyer possessed was an extremely sensitive ear for verbal music, a gift that, however 'literary' its speech may be, never fails to delight the reader, for among the best of Hillyer's lyrics the clear strains of sixteenth-century music were revived and were sounded with the mastery that conceals its art." This volume includes English translations Hillyer did of Danish poems by notable Danish poets (sometimes for the first time). That includes: Adam Oehlenschläger (1779-1850), B.S. Ingeman (1789-1862), Poul M. Møller (1794-1838), Christian Winther (1796-1876), Frederick Paludan-Müller (1809-1876), Holger Drachmann (1846-1908), Johannes Jørgensen (1866-1956), Ludvig Holstein (1864-1943), Jeppe Aakjær (1866-1930), Sophus Claussen (1865-1931) and Johannes V. Jensen (1873-1950) . Between 1937-1945 Hillyer was the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and taught several authors including Howard Nemerov, James Agee and Theodore Roethke. After that appointment ended, Hillyer taught at Kenyon College between 1948-1951 and ultimately finished his teaching career at University of Delaware between 1954-1961. In addition to publishing several more poetry collections after winning the Pulitzer, Hillyer published two books about versification and several scholarly essays about well-known poets. To avoid having lines of poetry run onto multiple lines, reading this ebook on smaller displays (such as mobile phones) is not recommended.

Interview with the Sphinx: A Play
Interview with the Sphinx: A Play

Author: Jack Matthews

Publisher: Personville Press

Published:

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13:

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In this provocative & immensely irritating comic play, the Sphinx from ancient Greece is interviewed in modern times as though she were a celebrity pop star. The problem is, she never answers any questions -- never directly anyway. Instead she prefers just dishing the dirt on everybody. ON HOMER: "I never was exactly sure which one Homer was. I'm positive he wasn't the blind one, though; that was just a silly story they started telling a few centuries later". ON OEDIPUS: "Eddie was terribly conceited, you know … of course he was smart and handsome and, oh, just had a way of carrying himself that impressed everybody. In spite of his foot." Bit by bit the Interview learns that what happened in Greek legend didn't happen exactly the way Sophocles described it. Fortunately, the Sphinx offers the Interviewer another riddle ... if only he could figure out what exactly it is! Part Tom Stoppard, part Monty Python, part Oscar Wilde, this play by Jack Matthews combines philosophical paradoxes with fast-paced verbal pyrotechnics. It offers the perfect antidote to people who remembered ancient literature as nothing but stuffy and melodramatic characters with hard-to-pronounce names. In 2013 an audio version of this one act play was produced by Personville Press. This ebook contains the complete script used for the 2013 audio production plus another expanded two act version of the same play. This expanded two act version is titled "Dr. Freud and the Sphinx," and includes Florence Nightingale and Sigmund Freud characters (who serve as the Greek chorus). "Mr. Matthews is a master of prose conversation and deadpan charm. He is ironic, cool, and shrewd, and he writes a lucid prose." (Tom O'Brien, New York Times)