Uncle Errol throws a funeral for himself. Bootsie spies on her own husband. Joe's band dresses in costumes and plays instruments from elementary school music class. Marco is tired of people shouting "Polo " over his shoulder. Mallory unlocks the doors between hotel suites in case the person beside her is also searching and alone. Denise eats crayons and goes missing. Gary tries to legally change his name to get back at his sworn enemy. Tell Me How You Really Feel is the only novella set in the municipality of Murrysville, Pennsylvania.

Tell Me How You Really Feel

Hopple, Claire

Literature & Fiction

Maudlin House

"Wry. Hilarious. Hopple's pacing is masterful and gives the sense that these stories were meant to be read aloud, whispered from person to person as if gossip tangled in a game of telephone. When Hopple writes, 'Because I need to believe that they believe it. I need to believe it's possible for someone to know, not just think, something like that,' I believe. You will believe too."--Keegan Lester, winner of the 2016 Slope Editions Book Prize judged by Mary Ruefle "These stories are not simply powerful, human meditations on life, love, and loss, they are proof-positive examples that the tiniest, quirkiest bits of our lives are exactly the moments that make us who we are. Everything matters, and everyone counts in Hopple's fiction, because every sentence is loaded with profundity, humor, and heart." --Nick Gregorio, author of This Distance"Claire Hopple's characters are lost and worn and they are examined with a pin-perfect exactness that reaches for and touches the sublime. Tired People Seeing America is modern American short fiction in top form."--Daniel DiFranco, author of Panic Years"These stories will find a residence in you where you least expect it."--C. C. Hannett, author of I Gave This Dream to a Color"Claire Hopple has written an intense, vivid book. A worthy edition to the Dostoyevsky Wannabe lineup."--Shane Jesse Christmass, author of Yeezus in FursFrom historical reenactors to water bed owners to professional mermaids, these stories show eccentric characters grappling with the postmodern American landscape and how it affects personal identity.

Tired People Seeing America

Literary

Independently published

"Give me unlikable narrators and holographic selves, remembered through strange artifacts: Bob Ross Chia Pets, talismanic jars of tonsils, oversized alligators. Give me Claire Hopple's epistolary novel, where formal gestures towards intimacy are undermined by the content. Each chapter is addressed to someone (coworkers, old friends, former neighbors, family members, strangers, the speaker, herself); intimacy collides with estrangement to alienate what it seems to draw near. With one foot on the sustain-pedal of second-person address, Hopple's voice is stereoscopic, conversational, baroque, displaced by questions of power and perspective. What do we know about shared experiences and closeness? What is friendship in collapsed contexts? What is "witness" when our own take is the primary allegiance? Color me haunted, disturbed, and thoroughly fascinated." - Alina Stefanescu, author of Ribald "Written in prose that's poetic and rambling like a Bob Dylan song, IT'S HARD TO SAY is inhabited by characters you'd swear you've met before: too strange to be fictional and too funny to resist recounting to a friend." - Shannon McLeod, author of Whimsy "Claire Hopple writes with such concision and style, I had to scrape my jaw from the floor after reading it's hard to say. It's hard to say just how good this little book truly is without sounding hyperbolic, but I'll try. It is great." - Troy James Weaver, author of Temporal "Acerbic, observant and wise, Claire Hopple makes magic with the flash epistolary form, translating the experimental into an emotionally affecting, lovely book." - Chaya Bhuvaneswar, author of White Dancing Elephants, a PEN/ American Bingham Prize finalist.

It's Hard to Say

Genre Fiction

Word West LLC

"At first glance Claire Hopple's stories appear delightfully off kilter, even laugh-out-loud funny, but the flashes of wisdom start early in this collection and they don't stop. This is a world of constant disorientation where people aim for connection and gamble on intimacy, no matter how precarious. Hopple's small towns are in decline and her families are fragile. Everybody lives here: older relatives who unravel or disappear; a sibling tipping over into frightening criminality; three generations of women with the same name in the same house who manage to lose each other; a hitchhiker who proves the lie of American life; a couple of friends from childhood, forever connected in a web of communal memory. After watching Hopple's characters question the scripts they've been handed, we are left to marvel at the hard work of being lost." ~ Jan Stinchcomb, author of 'Find the Girl'

Too Much of the Wrong Thing

Truth Serum Press

Evoking the black humor of Kurt Vonnegut, Jonathan Lethem's way of subverting expectations, and a delightful strangeness endemic to a world of her own, Claire Hopple's work reveals the enchanting, the absurd, the violent, and the sensational. A woman wants to be caught stealing people's identities, but nobody is paying attention. A suburban father becomes convinced that he's transformed into a dinosaur-shaped chicken nugget. A hitman's target collapses before he can be killed. The novella and stories in Echo Chamber reverberate, wild and beautiful.

Echo Chamber

Short Stories & Anthologies

Trident Business Partners