Fiction. Edited by Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney. Introduction by Ron Carlson.BREVITY &amp; ECHO is an essential anthology of previously published short shorts by Emerson College alumni. BREVITY &amp; ECHO broadens the scope of this rich and expanding genre with a wide range of flash fiction styles, and celebrates of the continuing legacy of Emerson's writing program. The anthology contains work by Don Lee, Denise Duhamel, Lee Harrington, and many more, as well as an introduction by Ron Carlson and an afterword by Pamela Painter. These tiny fictions—the longest weighing in at 1400 words and the shortest at just 55—appeared originally in the pages of such books and journals as McSweeney's, StoryQuarterly, Quick Fiction, What If?, Night Train, failbetter, and Best American Non-Required Reading.

Brevity & Echo: An Anthology of Short Short Stories

Literature & Fiction

United States

Rose Metal Press

Poetry. A book-length narrative poem, or a novella-in-verse if you prefer, HOW TO BUILD THE GHOST IN YOUR ATTIC is a novel-poem with a literary sci-fi bent, a shadow-text to Oedipus written in a style that is up-to-the-minute. With wit, dynamism, and cutting senses of urgency and humor, Iowa Prize winner Peter Jay Shippy tells the tale of Isaac Makepeace Watt, a melancholy man living in a Thebes that is much like contemporary America. The House of Cadmus still rules (and will fall), but they only appear in the poem as media white noise. Isaac's concerns are personal, his father's illness and his own moral decrepitude. There are talking monkeys, plagues, oracles, and nano-robots-you know, the usual agoramania.

How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic

Shippy, Peter Jay

Poetry

Fiction. The four chapbooks collected in A PECULIAR FEELING OF RESTLESSNESS, three of them finalists and one of them the winner of the Rose Metal Press first annual short short chapbook contest, all revel in the succinctness of their form, the underlying tension anchored beneath each story of 1,000 words or less. These stories are peculiar; they resonate with restlessness. They are deft, they are gritty, and they are lyrical. Laughter, Applause. Laughter, Music, Applause by Kathy Fish, Wanting by Amy L. Clark, Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix by Elizabeth Ellen, and The Sky Is a Well by Claudia Smith combine four multi-layered portrayals of beautiful uneasiness into a collection rich with wit, grace, and originality.

A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women

Claudia Smith

Kathy, Fish

Amy L Clark

Elizabeth Ellen

Poetry. Set on the margins of Seattle, beneath bridges and on the banks of waterways, in strip clubs and flooded farmland, the prose poems in TINDERBOX LAWN illuminate the intersection of domesticity and bohemia, orthodoxy and passion. Each untitled block of prose constitutes a novel-in-miniature, with shadow characters and shards of plot. The intensity of Carol Guess's poems builds through lyrical language and recurring images, capturing the moment when the small mad heart at the center of things stalls mid-tick. "This is such deep, rich writing. TINDERBOX LAWN feels like dreams you forgot as you walk through your day but it's your life. I mean we never think as deeply as we live and Carol Guess tries to braid those strands and succeeds. I love being in this work"—Eileen Myles.

Tinderbox Lawn

Guess, Carol

With its unprecedented gathering of 25 brief essays by experts in the field, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction meets the growing need for a concise yet creative exploration of the re-emerging genre popularly known as flash fiction. The book's introduction provides, for the first time, a comprehensive history of the short short story, from its early roots and hitherto unknown early publications and appearances, to its current state and practice. This guide is a must for anyone in the field of short fiction who teaches, writes, and is interested in its genesis and practice.
 Featuring essays by: Steve Almond, Rusty Barnes, Randall Brown, Mark Budman, Stace Budzko, Robert Olen Butler, Ron Carlson, Pamelyn Casto, Kim Chinquee, Stuart Dybek, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Sherrie Flick, Vanessa Gebbie, Tom Hazuka, Nathan Leslie, Michael Martone, Julio Ortega, Pamela Painter, Jayne Anne Phillips, Jennifer Pieroni, Shouhua Qi, Bruce Holland Rogers, Robert Shapard, Deb Olin Unferth, Lex Williford

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field

Tara L. Masih

Essays & Correspondence

Poetry. Literary Criticism. A wide-ranging gathering of 34 brief essays and 66 prose poems by distinguished practitioners, THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO PROSE POETRY is as personal and provocative, accessible and idiosyncratic as the genre itself. The essayists discuss their craft, influences, and experiences, all while pondering larger questions: What is prose poetry? Why write prose poems? With its pioneering introduction, this collection provides a history of the development of the prose poem up to its current widespread appeal. Half critical study and half anthology, THE FIELD GUIDE TO PROSE POETRY is a not-to-be-missed companion for readers and writers of poetry, as well as students and teachers of creative writing.

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice

History & Criticism

Fiction. COLOR PLATES is a museum of stories, curated by a sort-of Mary Cassatt. Four rooms of Mary's museum are open to the public, and they are named Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Mary Cassatt. COLOR PLATES contains sixty-three little stories—plates—spun from real paintings by these painters. The stories range from sweet to weird, from melancholy to funny. This isn't just a short story collection, and it isn't a novel, but something else entirely. The plates each stand alone, offering startling visions and situations. Yet at the same time, COLOR PLATES offers the depth of a novel, with recurring characters, themes, and motifs. The museum says: My name is Mary and Mary is my museum. Paintings are brushstroke upon brushstroke. With a pencil I lift each brushstroke and make lines. Line upon line, story upon story, the small fictions in COLOR PLATES will engage you, delight you, and challenge you to consider the intersections between art and time.

Color Plates

Golaski, Adam

Literary

Fiction. THEY COULD NO LONGER CONTAIN THEMSELVES contains—but just barely—five chapbooks of flash fiction, including the winner of the third annual Rose Metal Press short short chapbook contest, and four of the finalists from the fourth. Dropped toddlers, attempted drownings, juvenile promiscuity, road trips, and inappropriate therapy sessions compose the multi-voiced family portrait in Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake by Elizabeth J. Colen. Yoga stalkers, guns and gold, babies with iron stomachs, drunkards with t-shirt cannons, and warlocks are the stuff of Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever by John Jodzio. Dominatrixes and fetishists, face paint and goo, fierce parental love and perverse longings cohabitate in Evan's House and the Other Boys Who Live There by Tim Jones-Yelvington. Leukemia, meteorites, Wal-Mart, bocce ball, Charlie Brown's clinical depression, the language of talking crows and of Che Guevara's omelets fill the eggs in How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace. And smallstories about pretty girls who sit quietly and behave themselves (or not) populate the pages of Paper and Tassels by Mary Miller.

They Could No Longer Contain Themselves: A Collection of Five Flash Chapbooks

Miller, Mary

Colen, Elizabeth J.

Jodzio, John

Jones-Yelvington, Tim

Lovelace, Sean

Poetry. The linked poems in THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE carry the reader past Ozzie Smith and Thomas Jefferson into a world where the moon is an outlaw, a weeping elephant flees from the authorities, the Pinkertons upset the sky, effigies of Phil Niekro are burned, and a society made of words collapses. According to Scott Glassman of Rain Taxi, Goar's "clause-free declarative sentences are a perfect match for the edgy grade-school surrealism that guides us into emotional revelation." THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE is what Alice would have found had she fallen into William Clark's map instead of a rabbit hole; it is an uncanny territory that both delights and disturbs. "With America behaving as it does today, we all need to better understand the American beauty of years past and the American beauty that is yet to come. Jim Goar's THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE reinvents a landscape so similar and dissimilar to what we know of a country's terrain that it is obviously a beauty that is yet to be. Or more so, Goar reinvents a country that has no limits because it exists in the alternate space of the supernatural. So that a 'President's signature is printed on the face of the moon' in order to create a world where 'Kansas starts to bleed' so that 'the sun is taken from the sky' and likewise, to make a space where a human-modified moon can exist with us in a plain way, do our bidding, and also fight back. You should read this book. It's not the American story you learned about in third grade. It's the one you wanted to learn. It's the one that was always the true story."—Dorothea Lasky

The Louisiana Purchase

Goar, Jim

I Take Back The Sponge Cake: A Lyrical Choose-your-own-adventure

NELSON

SIERRA

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