{"title":"Short-Fiction Collections","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"collected-stort-shories","title":"Collected Stort Shories","description":"\u003cp\u003eA ten-piece collection that puns on its own typos and describes itself as \"ten of the stortest shories ever written.\" The pieces fold algorithmically generated language in with found and documentary materials: a fictionalized Bigmart employee-rule change, a discussion about purchasing death, a Halloween affidavit, a radiation-themed Christmas story.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe method is the point. An overheard rule or affidavit, left with its own logic running, becomes the engine of the prose. The book is the page-side record of a procedure Belgum has been pursuing for decades on radio and recording, where the same instinct works by ear.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is the only book Belgum has published with us, and the one place to read the procedure on the page: language treated as found material, sequenced for the strangeness inside it rather than rewritten out.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Erik Belgum","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350595223709,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/collected-stort-shories.png?v=1641450701"},{"product_id":"short-tails","title":"Short Tails","description":"\u003cp\u003eA book of short prose from the writer who spent his career shrinking fiction toward its essentials. The title is a pun: short tales told short, and the opposite of tall tales. Tarnawsky offered these as honest stories, however outrageous, rather than lies meant to titillate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAcross two dozen prose pieces the collection cuts into the absurd nature of human life. A body shrinks until it is a single eye watching its own end. A man screams in pain as if singing an Indian raga for a pittance. Another tries to force his body into the shape of a cube to match the witty name his parents gave him. A resident of Lisbon boards the yellow streetcar, as everyone does in the end, and rides it obediently into the emptiness at the edge of the Atlantic.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSeparate as they look, the pieces gather into one novel-like narration built from painful truths. The compression is the substance; the brevity is not the constraint.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yuriy Tarnawsky","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598238365,"sku":null,"price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/short-tails.png?v=1641450694"},{"product_id":"naked-lunch-at-tiffanys","title":"Naked Lunch at Tiffany's","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eNaked Lunch at Tiffany's: Erotic Classics Reimagined\u003c\/em\u003e takes a single target and works it end to end: the erotic canon. Derek Pell rewrites and roasts the major works of classic and contemporary erotica, from the Kama Sutra to \u003cem\u003eFifty Shades of Grey\u003c\/em\u003e, as a sequence of satirical texts. Nile Southern, author of \u003cem\u003eThe Candy Men\u003c\/em\u003e, supplies the introduction.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe book is part of a parody line Pell has run for decades. He is the author of \u003cem\u003eAssassination Rhapsody\u003c\/em\u003e and the \u003cem\u003eDoktor Bey\u003c\/em\u003e satires, and the method here is the same: hold the form of the source straight while the content goes sideways, one canonical work at a time.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Derek Pell","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598369437,"sku":null,"price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/naked-lunch-at-tiffanys.png?v=1641450673"},{"product_id":"xanthous-mermaid-mechanics","title":"Xanthous Mermaid Mechanics","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eXanthous Mermaid Mechanics\u003c\/em\u003e is Brion Poloncic's first book — his first work in any literary form after a recording career as A Tomato A Day, begun in 1993, and a self-taught visual-art practice begun in 2006. The book is a sequence of prose poems.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne reviewer described the contents as hard electric prose poems about drugs, sex, poverty, alienation, music, schizophrenia, and philosophy, and called the result a cross between Burroughs and Bukowski. The second of Poloncic's JEF books is \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/psychedelic-everest\"\u003ePsychedelic Everest\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Brion Poloncic","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598828189,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/xanthous-mermaid-mechanics.png?v=1641450612"},{"product_id":"od-docufictions","title":"OD: Docufictions","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOD: Docufictions\u003c\/em\u003e is a collection of thirteen short fictions built around a single fact: thirteen famous personages who either died of an overdose or were so invested in drugs that the drugs helped kill them. The roster runs Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday, Bela Lugosi, Aldous Huxley, Freud, Poe, Lead Belly, Sonny Liston, Diane Arbus, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Abbie Hoffman. The title is the abbreviation a coroner writes; the book is what Harold Jaffe does with what comes after.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDocufiction is the form the book runs on: news reports, court records, and other documentary source material treated with minimal but pointed intervention, a transposed line, a rearranged paragraph, a recontextualization that lets the original telling expose its own ideology and pathology. Reviewing this book, Joseph D. Haske located Jaffe's docufictional style closer in spirit to free verse than to standard fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harold Jaffe","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350599319709,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/od-docufictions.png?v=1641450557"},{"product_id":"paris-60","title":"Paris 60","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eParis 60\u003c\/em\u003e is sixty short entries, some fictionalized and some factual, recorded across a Paris spring and written against the template of Baudelaire's \u003cem\u003eParis Spleen\u003c\/em\u003e. The number is the structure: sixty prose pieces, a modern poet's city set beside the nineteenth-century one that named the prose poem. Jaffe wrote them on a two-month sabbatical in 2008, working the city as a self-styled flaneur and self-acknowledged outsider.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe book sits squarely in the docufiction project Harold Jaffe spent four decades developing: short prose that intersects journal, essay, narrative, and verse, taking documentary source material and treating it with minimal but pointed intervention that lets the original telling expose its own ideology. Citing Gramsci, Jaffe embraces the activist writer who, like the Baudelaire of \u003cem\u003eParis Spleen\u003c\/em\u003e, seeks to turn melancholy into a principle of conquest. The book has been translated for readers in Romania, Turkey, France, Japan, Italy, and Cuba.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is the late-period Jaffe taking his method on the road and pressing it against the city that invented the form he had been working in all along.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harold Jaffe","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350599614621,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/paris-60.png?v=1641450676"},{"product_id":"qa-an-auto-interview","title":"Q↔A: An Auto-Interview","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eQ↔A: An Auto-Interview\u003c\/em\u003e is exactly what its title says: James R. Hugunin interviewing himself. The deluxe hardcover, lavishly illustrated in full color, sets questions against answers and threads in large excerpts from his major works, so the book doubles as a guided way into the rest of his shelf.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is also the clearest single instance of his method. Hugunin calls his practice \u003cem\u003eludicakadroman\u003c\/em\u003e, \"a playful species of autotheory, theory-in-action,\" in which the memory of lived experience is one material among artworks, theory, and other literary texts. An auto-interview turns that practice on its own maker: the critic reads himself.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA natural companion to his JEF novels, including \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/case-x\"\u003eCase X\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"James R. Hugunin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350600794269,"sku":null,"price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/qa-an-auto-interview.png?v=1624835640"},{"product_id":"crocodile-smiles-short-shrift-fictions","title":"Crocodile Smiles: Short Shrift Fictions","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eCrocodile Smiles\u003c\/em\u003e is Tarnawsky's collection of what he called \u003cem\u003eshort shrift fictions\u003c\/em\u003e: compressed, absurdist, lit as if on a bright stage. The title asks whether a crocodile can smile if it cannot cry, and the stories proceed in that register.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe cast runs to a barber attached to a pair of scissors that will not stop and an adulteress who bludgeons her husband to death, each figure shown in a hard flat light with the explanation withheld. The stories make their case by leaving out what a longer story would have explained.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the short-form companion to the longer mininovels of his \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/products\/like-blood-in-water-five-mininovels-the-placebo-effect-trilogy-1\"\u003ePlacebo Effect Trilogy\u003c\/a\u003e, the compressed-fiction project he spent decades refining. \u003cem\u003eCrocodile Smiles\u003c\/em\u003e is where the compression goes furthest: the bright stage, the figure cut off mid-gesture, the explanation never arriving. Read in order, the collection is a tour through the procedure his career circles back to.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Yuriy Tarnawsky","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350601580701,"sku":null,"price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/crocodile-smiles-short-shrift-fictions.png?v=1624833765"},{"product_id":"longing-letters-lasting-lasting-letters-longing","title":"Longing Letters Lasting, Lasting Letters Longing","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eLonging Letters Lasting, Lasting Letters Longing\u003c\/em\u003e is a short-fiction collection that takes a position about language: that meaning is made in words, not found behind them. The working premise is Beckett's line from \u003cem\u003eMolloy\u003c\/em\u003e, \"saying is inventing,\" and the book follows the premise into surrealism.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe vignettes move through \"legless scarecrows\" and \"snowmen in the land of the word-flame burning in the meaning-ice,\" figures pressed into a single argument that words outlive the people who say them. The factually fictional world of the book treats meaning as the activity of comprehension — something to be made, deconstructed, and reconstructed — rather than as anything fixed before the sentence.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Vahid Paeez","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46492631498909,"sku":"","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/KDPCover2front.png?v=1744373458"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/collections\/short-fiction-collections\/short-fiction.oembed","provider":"The Journal of Experimental Fiction","version":"1.0","type":"link"}