Quick Fiction

Believe in Butler

Quick Fiction — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:37:35 -0400

Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas has been named 1 of 5 finalists for The Believer Book Award. Go, Blake! Read it before everyone else in the world does.

Can you say Czyzniejewski?

Quick Fiction — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:22:20 -0400

Michael Czyzniejewski, who has a new book out, has been getting some great press recently (and by proxy so have we). Read an interview at Fiction Writers Review.

How To

Quick Fiction — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:40:24 -0400

Aaron Burch's chapbook.

Pushcart Hopes

Quick Fiction — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:05:33 -0400

Just nominated for 2009 Pushcarts: Kirsten Rue's Spelling, Salvatore Pane's Fences Fly By, Dylan Nice's Their Health, and Randall Brown's It Doesn't.

Spelling

Quick Fiction — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:02:41 -0400

The words never come simply to her, never just arrive the way milk bottles shiver down the shoots in old factory footage, each lid smacked on with a popping sound. They aren’t just ready; they aren’t just there. She works around them. Perambulates. Circumlocutes. She asks her mother to pass the steel wedge. Her sister looks like a nose-face with whiskers. Please, can I have the grains in the holder? In school, the numbers pair themselves off: the 4 links arms with the 8; the plateau of the long-division table separates the bawling 2 from its mother—the stolid 6. [9 comments]

Ghost Problem

Quick Fiction — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:01:55 -0400

Ignore the knocking from the lying-in room while you rake the leaves. Your wife irons the bed sheets and stacks them in the closet. The house shudders like a sleeping horse, and the teacups rattle on their hooks. Out comes the silverware polish. The chandeliers are next. The trees are bare, and the blackened limbs conspire with the burnt fields. You make your way to the hole in the fence where you keep your cigarettes. Only one left. Then the groaning comes. Uncle Bill, drunk on the porch with a carton of milk tucked between his legs, shouts at the ghost. “Get the fuck out of here!” He bangs his wheelchair into the wall, scuffs the siding. Smoke belches from the chimney; there is no fire. The children run, pretend to be scared. The leaves are the same color as your wife’s knuckles, the boys’ hair, the fresh ember you secretly nurture in the cup of your palm. The sky purples as you fire the piles. [3 comments]

Fences Fly By

Quick Fiction — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:00:59 -0400

Nick calls and says he’s driving across America and needs a place to crash for the night. I tell him I’ve got a futon, and he shows up at dusk in a real beater, explains he’s shipping out to Iraq in a month and wanted to see the country. We go to Church Brew Works, a Catholic church transformed into a bar. I like taking my old friends here, showing them this perversion, how things can change. We dated the same girl in college. Andrea. I had her freshmen and sophomore years and Nick handled the rest. He tells me they’ve broken up and obviously we have a lot to talk about. We run down our list of mutual grievances, at times feeble and unfair—the high pitch of her voice, her desperate need for coddling. We build her into something laughable and unrecognizable, a thing we can smash to smithereens with our microbrew and organic pizza. We get drunk and slosh our way home. [4 comments]

Their Health

Quick Fiction — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 04:00:00 -0400

She had me riding a ten-speed down a reclaimed railroad bed. She was talking about things she liked while I thought of things I did not like.

[1 comment]

News

Quick Fiction — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 04:00:00 -0400

Quick Fiction was featured in Daily Beast Lit Mag Round-up.

Mad to Review: Her Notes on his book Mad to Live

Quick Fiction — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 04:00:00 -0400

I read Randall Brown’s prize-winning chapbook Mad to Live in an hour, an hour and a half, and was sorry it didn’t last longer. Soon, no doubt, I will have an entire book of his stories, especially considering how quickly Flume Press sold out of the 500 copies printed. And with good reason—these 18 flash fiction stories about fathers and sons, men who want to make things right, and made up worlds are full of emotion and beauty. I’ve been reading and rereading certain stories, stretching the time out, especially “The Real,” which was one of the most memorable stories. The story starts out with a series of questions and then jumps into a first date scenario which ends with the couple going home and undressing. After the woman tells the man he can touch her, as much and wherever he wants, the writer emerges. The writer tells us that the story is made up, that it’s all lies, and the only truth is the reader. I have to admit to being a little jealous. I didn’t want to be the reader. I wanted to be the writer, the one making stuff up. But it’s petty, my jealousy, because here, in particular, I feel like Randall is able to do something I don’t have the skill set for, or I’m too scared to try. Now that I’m in a creative writing program, I know this is called “meta,” though I’m still uncertain what this means exactly, other than there’s a certain self-consciousness on the part of the writer, and the reader is let in on something of the process. The whole last section of the book—what if—is like this and I liked it a great deal more than I was prepared to. It makes me want to write a story about a writer who has writer’s block or something, but I’ll refrain. I love writers who pay very careful attention to their sentences, like you can tell he/she spent half an hour rearranging words to make sure it had the perfect rhythm and syntax. I found myself rereading many of Randall’s sentences. Sometimes he’s able to knock you down. And he knows exactly where to do it, when it will hit you hardest. I was thinking I could pluck out a bunch and show you my favorites, but it wouldn’t do them justice. I’ll do it anyway, but you’ve been forewarned: these sentences lack context. You don’t know how good they are until you contact Randall yourself and beg him for one of the few remaining copies. My mother will pick her up, shake Annie as if she isn’t real, and spit into her face, “I’m tired of your mother fucking my husband.” I wonder what Morton wants; most of my characters want to inhabit discarded bodies—that of my grandfather, aunt, mother, brother, ex-es—but Morton feels different. He wants his own body and life. The best thing about this collection is the way the flashes build upon each other. Like Kim Chinquee’s Oh Baby, these stories pile on top of each other to create something they aren’t capable of alone, and I think all flash fiction is basically this way, especially with writers who have very distinctive voices. This isn’t to say the stories can’t stand alone, they can, they’re only better in a collection. Mad to Live is the kind of book you’ll want to reread—to try and figure out the stories’ secrets and what the writer intended, but mostly because these flashes are complete and whole as they are.

[2 comments]