Bøger af Colin Fleming

Colin Fleming's masterful collection of short stories set in Cape Cod depicts a magically gritty and self-contained universe where landlubber tourists are called "googans" and locals drink at dive bars like "Sez the Flounder" and "The Ticky Crab."

A relationship ends in the space between [ ]. Abe Lincoln and Edgar Allan Poe Two stroll the river in the afterlife, debating a second death. Two boys navigate jazz, baseball, and growing up in the second between the pitch and the swing. And a man from Living Dangerously sets off across the ocean on a pile of lobster traps, seeking the truth of the smoke on the wind. With If You [ ], author Colin Fleming breaks the unwritten rule of the short story collection. In over thirty different styles, Fleming delivers a punk rock triple album in book form‿compositions that display a dizzying range of fearless artistry, from horror to hyper-experimental to a story disguised as a grocery list. Together, these pieces resonate with unexpected chords, exploring the breadth of human experience and affirming that that narrative is everywhere, if we are able and willing to see it.

In eighteen thematically linked stories, Colin Fleming explores the ways in which relationships end, with a focus on the void a loved one leaves behind. In Fire with Legs, the inhabitants of a noise machine discuss the end of a previous relationship, and the life that went with it. In Playing in Room B, an amateur videographer searches for his vanished wife in his movies, wondering when she started slipping out of the frame. In Green Wood, a man examines the death of his wife and the certainty of reality in a world where the TV program never changes. In The Char Paper Blues Band, a tiny group of professional musicians provides the background track to a couples life, from blissful harmony to the gradual souring of the song. Through magical realism and extended metaphor, Fleming explores the epiphenomena of failed relationships, the flotsam left behind in the wreckage of life as it was.