Fiction Collective Two – serie

Winner of FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize An unflinching and riveting meditation on the pain that attends every facet of existence–love and sacrifice and intimacy and beauty–a biography of torture. Like all of Vi Khi Nao's acclaimed and award-winning work, A Brief Alphabet of Torture bleeds across many modes and genres–poetry, essay, fiction, drama–and itself almost constitutes a novel of a different kind. Each tale captures the emotional, physical, psychological, political, and artistic concerns that pervade life like breath and which, even when very beautiful, are filled with pain. These stories are all facets of Nao's imagination that define the way she views creation, sexuality, violence, and the role of life in an ontological system that relies heavily on cultural, social, and artistic duress. Some stories like �Winter Rose� and �I Love You Me Neither� rise above the boundaries of pain to places of beauty and grace and love, where pain has no place, but make clear how rare such moments appear in life.

An enthralling, epic tale of the webs of misinformation that saturate, obscure, and complicate the vagaries of day-to-day life in modern America. It's 2006, and a cloud of darkness seems to have descended over the Earth–or at least over the minds of a ragtag assortment of Bay Area writers, drug dealers, social workers, porn directors, and Melvin, a street kid and refugee from his Mormon family. A shooter runs amok in an Amish schoolhouse, the president runs amok in the Middle East, a child is kidnapped from Disneyland, and on the local literary scene, a former child prostitute and wunderkind author that nobody has ever met has become a media sensation. But something is fishy about this author, Huey Beauregard, and so Melvin and his friends Felicia and Philip launch an investigation into the webs of self-serving stories, lies, rumors, and propaganda that have come to constitute our sad, fractured reality. Glory Hole is a novel about the ravages of time and the varied consequences of a romantic attitude toward literature and life. It is about AIDS, meth, porn, fake biographies, street outreach, the study of Arabic verb forms, Polish transgender modernists, obsession, and future life forms. It's about getting lost in the fog, about prison as both metaphor and reality, madness, evil clowns, and mystical texts. Vast and ambitious, comic and tragic, the novel also serves as a version of the I Ching , meaning it can be used as an oracle.

Interconnected stories depicting the last years of a WWII bomber pilot, his relationship with his daughter as both child and adult, and his drift into infirmity and death. When life dwindles to its irrevocable conclusion, recollections are illuminated, even unto the grave. Such is the narrative of Paradise Field: A Novel in Stories , whose title is taken from a remote airfield in the American Southwest, and while the father recalls his flying days, his daughter–who nurses the old man–reflects as well. Pamela Ryder's stories vary in style and perspective, and time lines overlap as death advances and retreats. This unique and shifting narrative explores the complexities of a relationship in which the father–who has been a high-flying outsider–descends into frailty and becomes dependent upon the daughter he has never really known. The opening story, �Interment for Yard and Garden,� begins as a simple handbook for Jewish burial and bereavement, although the narrator cannot help but reveal herself and her motives. From there, the telling begins anew and unfolds chronologically, returning to the adult daughter's childhood: a family vacation in France, the grotesqueries of the dinner table, the shadowy sightings of a father who has flown away. A final journey takes father and daughter back to the Southwest in search of Paradise Field. Their travels through that desolate landscape foreshadow the father's ultimate decline, as portrayed in the concluding stories that tell of the uneasy transformation in the bond between them and in the transcendence of his demise. Taken together, the stories in Paradise Field are an eloquent but unsparing depiction of infirmity and death, as well as solace and provocation for anyone who has been left to stand graveside and confront eternity.

Winner of FC2's Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. An imaginative, erotic rethinking of Bhopal’s disaster—and perhaps our own.On the night of December 2, as 1984 drew to its Reaganomic close, an explosion at an American-owned factory in Bhopal, India, released untold amounts of toxic gas on uncounted numbers of people, creating a human and environmental disaster of insurmountable proportions. Known as the Bhopal disaster, it once dominated international headlines, and is now barely remembered.Yet Bhopal remains emblematic of all the many quickly forgotten disasters that followed, and of the permanent state of globalized disaster in which we now dwell. What does it mean when corporations instead of states control not only the means to create environmental disasters, but also the tools to bury them? How does one revolt against these unelected entities? How do our most private desires get shaped by this stateless horror? Jennifer Natalya Fink’s Bhopal Dance is an epic and epochal tale of such a horror and its buried consequences.At the center of the novel is Cordelia, an owlish woman with a ménage of lovers, who leads a revolutionary Canadian political movement catalyzed by the Bhopal disaster, only to end up imprisoned with only a toilet to talk to. Who she hallucinates is her father. Who is her father. Who is the State. Who may be her mother. Or her twin/lover. Cordelia is a remarkable bird in her own right, and ‘owlishness’ is a feathery conceit deployed in both the book’s form and content, a way of exploring queer possibilities for altering the terms of one’s imprisonment. For setting corporatized corporeality alight. Ablaze. Pets and punk rock, dentists and dyslexia, Shakespeare and salsa: they all dance together here.

The Bitter Half disrobes the reality of gender, performing a striptease of masks and prosthetic devices, the subtle articulations and miscues of desire. A spit-curl lovingly tucked behind a diamond stud earring, hair brushed pageboy-style, a bibliographic collection of mastectomy scars: Toby Olson's characters swarm with sexual multiplicity, each offering for exhibit a cyclorama of titillating identities. This game of poses, of one self revealed within another, opens in a jail in Depressionera Pearce, Arizona. Chris Pollard, a consultant in the field of prison escapology, has arrived to investigate the case of an inmate who's broken out of every prison in which he has been detained. The two develop an evasive fondness from a distance - an attention to cowlicks and thin lips from between bars. Their relationship remains concealed among levels of identity, Russian Matryoshka dolls, a mystery within a mystery. Revealing their mutual attraction inch-by-inch, ""The Bitter Half"" uncovers a topographical map of seductions, of stratified assumptions and amorphousness. Toby Olson's latest work of fiction is rich in strangeness and erotic delight, a delectation to be enjoyed one layer at a time.

A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas decorating contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate?a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray’s stunning collection of stories: Museum of the Weird. Acerbic wit and luminous prose mark these shorts, while sickness and death lurk amidst the humor. Characters find their footing in these bizarre scenarios and manage to fall into redemption and rebirth. Museum of the Weird invites you into its hallways, then beguiles, bewitches, and reveals a writer who has discovered a manner of storytelling all her own.

Winner of the fC2 Catherine doctorow innovative fiction Prize.A new collection of stories by bestselling author Michelle Richmond, Hum presents a cautionary political fable, a celebration of the complexities of marriage, and a meditation on modern-day alienation.Thirteen years after the publication of her first story collection, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Richmond returns with Hum, a collection of ten stories that examine love, lust, and loyalty from surprising angles.In “Hum,” a young couple that is paid to live in a house filled with surveillance equipment becomes “quietly lost to each other,” as the wife’s infatuation with the subject of their surveillance turns to obsession.In “Medicine,” a woman grieving over the death of her sister finds her calling as a manual medical caregiver. In “Boulevard,” a couple who has been trying to have a child for seven years finds themselves in an unnamed country at the height of a revolution, summoned there by the enigmatic H. “Scales,” the story of a woman who falls in love with a man whose body is covered with scales, parses the intersection of pain and pleasure. The narrator of “Lake” must choose whether to walk in the foot- steps of her famous grandfather, The Great Amphibian, who disappeared while performing a feat of daring in Lake Michigan. What does it mean to be heroic? How much should one sacrifice in the name of love? These questions and more are explored with tenderness, wit, and unerring precision in Hum.

Theories of Forgetting is concerned with how words matter, the materiality of the page, and how a literary work might react against mass reproduction and textual disembodiment in the digital age.Theories of Forgetting is a narrative in three parts. The first is the story of Alana, a filmmaker struggling to complete a short documentary about Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork, The Spiral Jetty, located where the Great Salt Lake meets the desert. Alana falls victim to a pandemic called The Frost, whose symptoms include an increasing sensation of coldness and growing amnesia. The second involves Alana’s husband, Hugh, owner of a rare-and-used bookstore in Salt Lake City, and his slow disappearance across Jordan while on a trip both to remember and to forget Alana’s death. The third involves marginalia added to Hugh’s section by his daughter, Aila, an art critic living in Berlin. Aila discovers a manuscript by her father after his disappearance and tries to make sense of it by means of a one-sided “dialogue” with her brother, Lance.Each page of the novel is divided in half. Alana’s narrative runs across the top of the page, from back to front, while Hugh’s and his daughter’s tale runs “upside down” across the bottom of the page, from front to back. How a reader initially happens to pick up Theories of Forgetting determines which narrative is read first, and thereby establishing the reader’s meaning-making of the novel.

In this dazzling debut about life after loss, Luke B. Goebel’s heart-hurt, ultra-adrenalized alter ego, H. Roc, leads us on a raucous RV romp across what’s left of postmodern America and beyond. Whether it’s gobbling magic cacti at a native ceremony in Northern California, burning bad manuscripts in a backyard bonfire in East Texas, or travelling at top speed to an infamous editor’s office in Manhattan (with a burnt-out barista and an illegal bald eagle as companions), scene by scene, story by story, Goebel plunges us into a madly original fictional realm characterized by heartbroken psychedelic cowboys on the brink - lonely men who wrestle wild dogs on cheap beaches and kick horses in the face to get ahead.Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours is a rare book: Goebel’s ingenuity, humanity, and humor streak through every page.

What does it mean to really live? Or not?Set in eastern, upstate New York, Helen Keller Really Lived features a fortyish former barfly and grifter who must make a living in the wake of her wealthy husband’s death, and who finds work in a clinic helping women seeking reproductive assistance. The other main character is the grifter’s dead ex-husband, a Ukrainian hooker-to-healer success story, who prior to his demise was a gynecologist and after, an amateur folklorist, or ghostlorist, who collected and provided scholarly commentary on the stories of his fellow “revenants.”Their intertwined stories explore the mistakes, miscarriages, inadequacies, and defeats that may have led to their divorce, including his failure (according to her) to “fully live.”As it investigates the theme of what it means to “really live” or not, Elisabeth Sheffield’s brilliant new novel is also an exploration of virtual reality in the sense of the experience provided by literature. It is a novel awash in a multitude of voices, from the obscenity-laced, Nabokovian soliloquys of the dead Ukrainian doctor, to the trade-school / midcentury-romance-novel-constrained style of his dead mother-in-law.