The guide of choice for anyone who plans to die someday--are YOU ready for the AFTERLIFE? To find out, take this simple quiz: 1. Like Earth, the Afterlife has celebrities, outcasts, deadheads, losers, and busybodies. True False 2. Is there an Afterlife after the Afterlife? Yes No 3. When you first arrive on "the Other Side," you will be given: a) a set of wings b) a toaster c) a copy of A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife Don't worry if you're not sure how to respond. A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife has answers to these questions and more--and if you're lucky, some of them may turn out to be right! An irreverent, one-of-a-kind compendium from the award-winning author of Ishmael, A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife can be read as a parable, an allegory, a work of fiction--or exactly what it claims to be: a helpful handbook for the recently deceased. It is filled with uncommon wisdom, bizarre imaginings, uncanny perceptions, and unexpected humor. Is it fantastic escapism or a seminal event in human history? Read it and find out.... Face it. The Afterlife is the ultimate test. You might as well study.

Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife: On the Other Side Known Commonly As "The Little Book"

Literature & Fiction

Quinn, Daniel

Whalen, Tom

Humor & Satire

Bantam]

Fiction. "THE PRESIDENT IN HER TOWERS is a deft, daft satire of bureaucracy, paranoia, professional envy, megalomania, the madness of specialization and the absence of transparency as they infect the university and, in general, our institutionalized existence. But Tom Whalen's exuberant, intelligent, and wryly allusive fiction is also an example—rare in our deadly serious literature—of the marvelous: a headlong adventure in storytelling, reminding us that writing needs no other justification than the esprit of a writer obedient to a high manic imagination. To read Whalen's book is a pleasure well beyond the ordinary; it is, in fact, to bear witness to a prodigious act of creation."—Norman Lock

The President in Her Towers

Ellipsis Press

The Idaho Review is an annual Literary Journal published by Boise State University.

The Idaho Review, Volume V

HALL, DONALD

Schmidt, Geoff

McNally, John

Bass, Rick

Pearlman, Edith

CHERRY, Kelly

Minot, Stephen

Holladay, Cary

Fincke, Gary

Bly, Carol

Mayo, Wendell

Thon, Melanie Rae

Harms, James

BUSCH, Frederick

Boise State Univ.

This collection comprises the three winning entries of the 1997 novella competition judged by George Garrett: TomWhalen's And Earth on Its Frozen Journey, first place; John S. Walker's Days of Captivity, second place; and Richard Plant's Deaths by Drowning, third place. And Earth on Its Frozen Journey is the bitter-sweet initiation chronicle of a group of neighborhood kids who live an almost enchanted life, like Dylan Thomas's protagonist in "Fern Hill," until Time begins to lead them to the darker realizations of death and sex, and the children, green and golden, as Thomas so beautifully put it, follow Him out of grace. John S. Walker's band of tortured misfits in Days of Captivity are thrown together at a veteran's hospital in Virginia. These are men blinded, paralyzed, deafened, and limb-shorn, not so much out of the heroism of war as their own folly. This is the agonizing story of a group of fragmented men trying to enter the real world again, a world of feeling, and their women, wives and girlfriends, who desperately try to help them enter it. Richard Plant's Deaths by Drowning takes the reader into an arena of realistic horror as a man and his son try to come to terms with a murder/rape they encounter on a fishing trip. Consumed by his hatred of the man who shot and beat him and disgusted with the ineptitude of law enforcement officials, Gray Morrison takes his pistol and goes among characters reminiscent of the rednecks from Deliverance to exact revenge. Judged by novelist George Garrett, director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, these stirring, powerful novellas are a testament to the genre our publishing world cannot seem to find a niche for. More fully developed than short stories but much more compact and focused than novels, the novella is still alive and well in America.

Three Novellas: Tom Whalen, "And Earth on Its Frozen Journey"; John S. Walker, "Days of Captivity"; Richard Plant, "Deaths by Drowning" (Texas Review Southern and Southwestern Poets Breakthrough Se)

Plant, Richard

Walker, John S

United States

Texas Review Press

How much dexterity does a writer need to write a “story” in a single sentence? In their virtuosic collection, brevity masters Harold Jaffe and Tom Whalen, drawing from a host of injustices currently at play on our teetering earth, meet this challenge with a variety of formal strategies: prose poems, micro-fictions, creation myths, pensées, headlines, fables, fragments, quotations, and graffiti. With its nuanced, often antiphonal structure, readers of Single-Sentence Stories will be engaged, entertained and informed by this unique collaboration.\nAs short prose grows more and more popular, practitioners have begun investigating sub-genres such as mini-prose, whose lineage goes back through Modernists like Scutenaire, Gómez de la Serna, and Félix Fénéon to the 18th Century aphorists. Here, two of our finest contemporary writers, longtime experimentalists, play ping pong with the form, scintillatingly. 
M. Kasper\nIn Single-Sentence Stories, Jaffe and Whalen investigate the mysteries, pathos, joys and comedy of human experience while at the same time offering us a celebration of the primacy, flexibility and power of that singular, wondrous creation: the sentence. 
R. Sebastian Bennett\nWhat Jaffe and Whalen have created is the perfect melding of form and meaning; they examine, in one-sentence stories, those who have themselves been sentenced, sentenced, that is, to marginalization, suppression, oppression, violence, and death, those who have been without and who have or have almost withstood, and Jaffe and Whalen do so in perfect succinctness as unrelenting agents for the awareness and action that are needed to bring radical improvement to this world we have all been sentenced to. 
Ekhard Gerdes

Single-Sentence Stories

Humor & Entertainment

Jaffe, Harold

Humor

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

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