In this new collection of short stories, Dactyl Literary Award winner Tom Newton once again playfully transmutes base reality into startlingly novel shapes and forms, shifting paradigms from beneath the reader's feet by deftly metamorphosing quotidian banality with whimsical, illusory invention. These twenty stories, then, curious and comic, artful and surreal, are acts of emancipation-written to set us free.
"Part deadpan comedian, part sleight-of-hand artist, part Sybil, but mostly narrative poet, Tom Newton delivers a new collection of stories that describe realities that act like language, referring to things outside of themselves. Pointing either to symbols or to jokes or to facts, the effect is a stunning animation of words."
-V.N. Alexander, author of Naked Singularity
"If Newton were a jazz musician, he'd be like Eric Dolphy. Such are his improvisational skills, the twists, turns, and liberties his stories take. He delves into mysteries only to discover more of them, layered and disordered. And often, he leaves them for us to solve."
-Mark Morganstern, author of The Joppenbergh Jump and The House of the Seven Heavens