Jeffrey Dinsmore, Clay McLeod Chapman, Kyle Jarrow
Description
Product Description
The villains at Awkward Press are at it again with Awkward Two, a collection of tales so fiendishly inventive they can barely be
...
contained by the rigid boundaries of their wood-pulp prison. The experience begins with the glorious front cover, a charming take on the theme of "Brevity" that has been lovingly hand-penciled by illustrious illustrator Baarbarian. Peel back the cover and find yourself transported to an unexpected world in which pirates hold court over human resources departments, house painters become religious leaders, and ants show up in the most unlikely of places.
Awkward Two features thirty-three original short works by twenty-five of the modern world's finest scribes in a package that is at once sophisticated and refreshingly humble. Designed by lauded New York graphics-artistry firm Rumors, Awkward Two is brimming with stories guaranteed to shock and amaze. Step inside its welcoming pages and immerse yourself in cracking-good tales of:
time-traveling hedonists!
sadistic lawyers!
tiny celebrities!
board-game characters come to life!
close encounters of the preteen kind!
heartbreaking machines!
gallivanting playwrights!
. . . and twenty-six other devilishly imaginative scenarios that must be read to be believed! A modest fee shall secure your passage aboard this chariot of delights. Next stop: adventure!
Featuring stories by: Heather Clitheroe
Matthew David Brozik
Clay McLeod Chapman
Nadja Stokes
Joshua Citrak
Ben Langhinrichs
Shari D. Frost
Paul Kavanagh
Jennifer Gravley
Jeffrey Dinsmore
Wayne Scheer
Kyle Jarrow
Michael Cipra
Lynnette D'Amico
Robert Cole
Joanna Whitmarsh
Ben Bush
Greg Pierce
John Harrower
James Veitch
Bruce Harris
G.K. Wuori
Rachel Lieberman
Vinnie Penn
Joseph Carfagno
Review
In fact, whether pensive or inventive, there s a surprise or two in every package in practically every 33 of the micro-short stories economically bubbling over the bounds of Awkward Two's one hundred pages. An array of subject matter, themes, styles, tones, and characters are represented. Don t like one story in this mostly hit, some miss, affair? Turn a page or two, flip on through there s another, and another... --Gordon Hauptfleisch, Blogcritics.com
This small volume of brief short stories smashes against any theory that short short stories are not great fiction. Awkward 2 Brevity fills itself with short stories that run the gamut from crime to bald-faced imagination. Within only 104 pages, this volume is crammed with great short stories and fast-paced and compressed short story writing. They say that poetry remains the compression of thoughts into the smallest amount of words possible; in this manner, the authors of Brevity 2 present short stories that are small microcosms of reality and unreality. Since I am a lover of fiction, I appreciated the pop-zang effect of creating an imaginary tableau in 1,500 words or less. Short stories have a beginning, middle and end, and to produce a powerful short story in this amount of words shows great intensity and talent. --The Review Broads
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