Short Tails

A 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.

Across 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.

Separate 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.