Michael Griffith – författare

Hybrid Creatures, Matthew Baker's sharp and innovative collection, follows four very different protagonists as they search for, and struggle with, connection: an amateur hacker attempts to track down his vanished mentor; a math prodigy, the child of divorced parents, struggles with being torn between his two families; a composer takes a spontaneous trip to Nashville while mourning his husband's death and gets trapped on a hotel rooftop with a hipster; and a wayward philosopher accepts a job working for an industrial farming corporation. Through-out, Baker explores the inner dialogue of failed, floundering, and successful bonds between strangers, among family and friends, and even within a person. Pairing the emotional pursuit of connection with multiple forms of communication, Baker weaves the languages of HTML, mathematics, mu-sical notations, and propositional logic into his storytelling in order to unveil nuances of experiences and emotions. This poignant formal invention articulates loneliness, grief, doubt, and comfort in ways that are inaccessible through traditional language alone.In both form and content, Baker captures the complexities of breaking and forming connections with other people, and the various lan-guages we use to navigate this inescapable human need, resulting in a moving exploration of interpersonal bonds.

Bed is where we sleep and dream, where we make love and give ourselves nightmares. The thirteen stories in Wendy Rawlings's Time for Bed traverse the complicated terrain of bedtime activity, from adulterous couplings to nightmares that come to life, in terms that can feel lurid, unsettling, or disturbingly funny. A college student struggles with her mother leaving her father for a ""cafeteria lady"" at her high school. A woman loses her only daughter in a mass school shooting and goes on a road trip to buy a custom coffin, then decides to take a side trip to NRA headquarters. A daughter decides she should be born again, literally. Social, cultural, and familial disruptions haunt these characters in their waking lives as they look to grab something or someone for stability.A collection of comic stories that confront difficult and tragic events, Time for Bed crafts dreamscapes and bizarre encounters into bedtime stories for adults.

Penelope Lemon is back for more madcap mom adventures in Inman Majors's hilariously unruly Operation Dimwit.It's summertime, and son Theo is away at camp. Feeling frisky, free, and tired of living vicariously through nighttime trysts with erotic novels, Penelope can begin phase two of her postdivorce life. First on the agenda is a date with the mysterious Fitzwilliam Darcy, who lives in a mansion with his snobbish cat, Algernon, and who spends his spare time painting massive nude portraits.Meanwhile, back at the trailer-park office, Penelope's boss, Missy, has become obsessed with getting rid of Dimwit, the backwoods interloper who may be stealing personal items from female residents. A sting operation to catch him in the act is planned, something so kooky and ill-advised that only a legendary goofball such as Missy could set it into motion.Throw in a bully trainer at Penelope's new gym, plus an infestation of skunks that requires the services of a wildlife expert and homespun mystic known as the Critter Catcher, and it becomes clear that Penelope's two weeks off from parenting won't be as relaxing and incident-free as she hoped.Building on the comedic hijinks of Penelope Lemon: Game On!, Operation Dimwit is a warmhearted look at the challenges of being a single working mom trying to stay afloat in the middle class after a divorce. Zany, stylish, and uproariously funny, this southern comedy will have readers laughing out loud at familiar absurdities of life in the twenty-first-century USA.

The innovative and dazzling short stories collected in Josh Russell's King of the Animals explore love and heartbreak, growing up and growing old, cities and suburbs, the fantastic and the everyday.A teenager and his family seek asylum in an Atlanta IKEA after their split-level is burned down because his father made fun of an autocrat's bad grammar. A man remembers how seeing a snapshot of his sister naked changed his life-and hers too. A talking doll fails her spelling test, and a king made of sugar and flour watches Fox News and smokes dope with the neighbor kid. A college student ponders the philosophical implications of a poetry-fueled one-night stand, and a father worries he's the reason his adult child hoards dogs. Ranging from pithy flash fiction to slow-burn stories meant to be savored, King of the Animals entwines the extraordinary with the commonplace, leaving us to wonder why we ever thought them separate.

In Mannequin and Wife, the debut story collection from Jen Fawkes, sharp and imaginative tales trip seamlessly across borderlands, navigating comedy and tragedy, psychological and magical realism, the mundane and the marvelous.Readers of these adventurous fictions will encounter a flock of stenographers, the strongest woman alive, a taxidermist with anger issues, an Elephant Girl, a fairy on her lunch break, and a married couple who live with a department store mannequin. Elsewhere, an American actor impersonates a code-breaking Britisher during World War II. A mother awaiting her son's return discovers his personal ad soliciting the services of a cannibal (and fears the worst). A criminal mastermind's protégé plots the destruction of Mount Rushmore from within an extinct volcano. A man buys a drive-in theater and transforms it into a carnival sideshow. And an attorney puzzles over how to leave someone his deceased client's heart.Fawkes's award-winning stories examine the vagaries of human relationships—mother and child, husband and wife, mentor and protégé—to tease out the startling complications that arise from our entanglements with those we loathe and those we love.