<p>Misplaced Alice is a collection of previously published and unpublished short stories. Most are very short stories - often referred to as short shorts. They are literary and language driven pieces. The stories in this collection most often take place in rural areas of the Pacific Northwest and in Seattle.</p>

Misplaced Alice: Stories

Literature & Fiction

Matt Briggs

Humor & Satire

StringTown Press

A sense of the bizarre unique to the Northwest runs through the stories in Moss Gatherers: a French cyclist is murdered by supposed "moss gatherers" in costal Oregon; a child has fungus growing on his forehead; and an old woman wearing a crown of lit candles plays a Victrola in a cornfield. The stories are infused with a sense of decay and stagnancy lit by surprising flickers of human decency, however small: a young girl plays boogie-woogie at her brother's wedding, and her family dances; an old woman tries to comfort a grieving teenager; and a woman preoccupied with safety leaves her front door wide open one night for the sake of a lost bird. Through these stories, we realize that the bizarre is always at the periphery of our otherwise mundane lives, and when we meet it, we are offered the chance to be forever changed. Stories have appeared in Northwest Review, The Seattle Review, StringTown, and The North Dakota Review. "Mirror Dress," was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and another story, "Red Breast" won the Nelson Bentley Prize in Fiction awarded to the best story published in a year of The Seattle Review by the magazine’s editors. Publication of the book is made possible in part by support from the Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, City of Seattle.

The Moss Gatherers

Briggs, Matt

Genre Fiction

with foreword by Stuart DybekIn Handbook for Drowning, Walter Jaffe grows up in a family obsessed with social justice; Walter fixates on his own mortality.  The novel's pointillistic structure reflects the gap between the grief Walter feels for his dying mother and the impersonal rationality he's been taught to practice.

Handbook for Drowning

David Shields

Short Stories & Anthologies

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Books by StringTown Press