Hazaiah's Head

Literature & Fiction

Miloshe, Orhan

Literary

Artless Dodges, Incorporated

"Yes, sentimentality: that phenomenon by which the emotional need of the viewer takes precedent over the reality of the object; sentimentality: the excessive and inappropriate infusion of meaning, the incorrect alignment of form and content; sentimentality: a child's perception, the stain of immaturity, sister to stereotype, father of prejudice, the soul of dramatic irony! What happiness: to surrender the child's frantic and broad assertions about the world for the nuance and subtlety of true understanding! What joy: to abandon these delusions, to marry form with content, to live without sentimentality!" - from The Sentimentalist The author begins by offering a definition: sentimentality, he says, is “the excessive and inappropriate infusion of meaning, the incorrect alignment of form and content.” Viewed in this way, sentimentality is an existential quagmire: how is one to know the “true” significance of others’ words, gestures, and actions? How is one to know the “true” significance of one’s own? Through the stories that follow the author stays close-cropped to this dilemma, highlighting the misunderstandings that occur between boyfriends and girlfriends, lovers, peers, colleagues, parents and children, and exploring the ways in which these fundamental misunderstandings can be rooted in or result in fundamental misunderstandings about ourselves. Written by Stavros Stavros Cover design by Tom Maven

The Sentimentalist

Stavros, Stavros

"Will you write about us, too?" she said after a while. "Will you write about how happy we were when we stood here together?" "I'll try to," I said. "It's a hard thing to write about. Nobody wants to read about two people who are happy. People like stories much better where everyone is unhappy and nothing works out." - from Hephaestus Thomas Tull’s vivid debut chronicles a romantic relationship from beginning to end. James and Katherine meet in college, date, get married, honeymoon, grow old. The life they lived on the world’s center stage - as the young and promising married couple - fades into unremarkable middle age. James’ work doesn’t interest him, and he drinks too much; Katherine lives a life separate but contained within their shared life. Hephaestus is a stark, poetic, and unflinching look at the slow and unprotested ebbing of youth and all of its promise. Written by Thomas Tull Cover design by Tom Maven

Hephaestus

Tull, Thomas

“I started thinking that Grant was right, that we all came from too much money. Not enough to spare us any hardship, but enough to take the edge off. We were never going to really fail or really succeed. Everything was going to be blunted by a buffer of money. There would always be money. We were never going to be destitute or struggling or starving. We would have to break entirely from our parents and their money to get anywhere near an experience that was not lessened by the knowledge that we would always be protected, looked out for, and kept from anything unpleasant or dirty. It was not life at all but something else, something lived walking six inches off the ground. I had never dropped anything that could not be replaced or transgressed in a way that couldn’t be corrected.” - from THE DISTINCTION OF THE MATURE AND THE HORROR OF THE NAIVE A pair of teenagers live their own version of Hemingway’s fiesta in Pamplona; a group of college students spends the weekend at a hotel for a friend’s wedding; a young bartender at a Mexican resort flirts with a pretty tourist: the characters in the seven stories that make up Fowler’s collection - his “youth in limbo” - share youth, but they also share a palpable uncertainty, a wavering and fragile becoming made all the more perilous by their awareness of it. They are characters on the brink: they are preparing to sacrifice their infinite possible futures for the singular lives they will live. While the anxiety of this phase of life is often forgotten in time, when memory has made the course of one’s life seem inevitable, in Fowler’s hands it becomes vividly palpable once more: these are characters staring down an impending tragedy, one made all the worse by its intangibility, by their uncertainty about it, by their inability to articulate its character, by the older world’s indifference to it. It is a tragedy Fowler captures with due restraint, subtlety, art, and compassion. Written by Ellison Fowler Cover Design by Tom Maven

The Distinction of the Mature and the Horror of the Naive: and Other Stories of Youth in Limbo

Fowler, Ellison

THE PRANK is a novel about the tendency for any news story involving a cute child or a reprehensible parent to become a media feeding frenzy, about the incredible communicative power of the internet, about the speed at which a fabricated happening can cross the threshold into accepted truth. But it is also about us as consumers of narrative: about how the digital revolution has changed the way we process information. My hope is that as you are reading you will find yourself scanning, skipping, dismissing, and cherry-picking: pay attention to these moments. This is your brain doing something remarkable, something profoundly post-modern, something perhaps not altogether benign.  - from the author's foreword Frank Nevis knows that there’s more than one way to get famous in America. When massive flooding strikes his town, only Frank has the presence of mind to weave a fabricated story into the actual drama unfolding around him. After all: what better way to attract interest and funding for his now-defunct reality show career? Fueled by the blogosphere, Facebook, Twitter, and the echo chamber of the 24-hour news cycle Frank’s fabrication is soon the biggest story breaking, but how long can he maintain his hastily-constructed lie? And where is the line, in the American audience’s thirst for “reality entertainment,” between the drama of Frank’s unraveling plans and his and his family’s fictional hardships? Written in a style intended to mimic the overwhelming cacophony that is news and culture in the 21st century, The Prank explores the question of reality in the digital age, where viral falsehoods and reported lies are par for the course.  Written by Adam Black Cover Design by Tom Maven

The Prank

Black, Adam