Notes toward the Story and Other Stories is a book of disparate parts, a sort of Frankenstein monster of a collection. And indeed there is a monster story, as well as a ghost story, an angel story, a mystical religious story, and a mystical secular story. Some of the work is experimental, some of it is outlandish, and some of it is as simple and comforting as a home-baked pie. It is the full range of the author s short fiction gifts on display. They are made of gypsum, bituminous coal, red bricks and whimsy. They are equal parts crassitude and chimera. The final story, Publisher, the book s longest, concerns a man working for a vanity press who discovers the real thing, a novel he is convinced will blast a hole in the complacency of modern literature. About Publisher, John Grisham said, It s not only funny and clever, it reminded me of the first 80 pages of Sophie s Choice. Great work. The stories have previously appeared in The Pinch, Orchid, Ghoti, Gargoyle and other fine periodicals.

Notes Toward the Story and Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

Corey Mesler

Short Stories & Anthologies

Aqueous Books

TO BE held in cupped hands and passed around with wonder, the storied worlds of I ll Give You Something to Cry About constitute a grouping born of spellbinding cosmic dust. Once more assuming the mantle of Story s guardian, Corey Mesler sets to work at not only protecting and preserving, but pondering, playing, prodding, and perambulating within the bounds of narrative creation and exhaustion. Whether in the form of wife- and life-stealing bear, manuscript-eating desk, disillusioned newlywed couple, title-swapping library collection, or man bent on redefining his neurotic existence, these tales fabled, monstrous, Southern, intimate, meta, everyday, other, biblical, and minor effect a coalescence of teller and listener that is nothing short of celestial.

I'll Give You Something to Cry About: A Gathering of Stories

Literary

Queen's Ferry Press

Poems of love. Poems of regret. Poems of loss. Poems of remembrance. Poems of forgetting. Poems of sexual longing and poems of sexual fulfilment.Poems to rattle the birdcage in your soul.Poems to answer the prayer, the one you thought was only yours, the final prayer, a petition for more time.

Among the Mensans: and other poems

Iris Press

Following Richard Brautigan

Following Richard Brautigan concerns a young writer of bad poetry living in Oklahoma City in the late 80s, who is visited by the ghost of the hippie writer Richard Brautigan. Jack, when the visitation occurs, is recovering from an aborted love affair, which coincidentally happened in San Francisco. That city becomes the focal point of the story, the place where magic can happen, a place seemingly out of time and between-worlds. The novel is a whimsical recounting of Jack s feckless life, his friends and lovers, his struggles with writing, and, then out of the blue, his singular haunting. Stylistically, it attempts to borrow some of Brautigan s goofball surrealism while establishing its own integrity. What begins as an off-center love story becomes for a while a road novel, as Jack and his ghost take to the highway and travel back to the scene, not only of Jack s affair but of the last days of Richard s life. Along the way they encounter lovely, loving women and an assemblage of Richard s friends, dead, alive, both. In San Francisco a transformative denouement awaits both of the novel s central figures. A portion of this novel won the Plan B Press Beat Writing Contest and was published by them as a chapbook.

Livingston Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Corey Mesler. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Corey Mesler

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Corey Mesler. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Notes Toward the Story and Other Stories

I'll Give You Something to Cry About: A Gathering of Stories

Among the Mensans: and other poems

Following Richard Brautigan