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thewilyfilipino's review against another edition
4.0
I can’t get over how much I admire Matt Fogarty’s debut collection of short stories, but let me get two points of admiration out of the way:
First, the guy is a lawyer. A practicing lawyer. I don’t mean a guy who plays one on TV — though that would be cool too — but a lawyer-lawyer. (I don’t know if he gets to stand up in court and argue in front of juries, but still.)
Second, turn to the copyright page, right under the “This is a work of fiction” disclaimer. Check out the paragraph that begins “Matthew Fogarty’s stories have been widely published.” What follows is a list of what seems like a couple dozen lit journals, some big, some small, where the stories originally appeared. Writers should all be so committed to the discipline, of submission, of placing one’s work at the feet of different editors. The man is an inspiration.
One thing that elevates Fogarty’s stories is that his empathy, his generosity of spirit, extends to the unexpected: Elvis impersonators, dinosaurs, Bigfoot, zombies, Andre the Giant, stagecoach marshals, astronauts, and of course, robots and mermaids. Folks perhaps like you and me. In the hands of a lesser writer this might be mere whimsy, but Fogarty generates these piercing moments of humanity from this unlikely assemblage of characters. Taken as a whole, one can’t help but admire the finesse, the facility, in which Fogarty moves between the different settings.
One of the challenges of writing flash is about never overstaying one’s welcome. To cut just before the denouement the reader has to imagine in her head, to resist the temptation to connect the dots, to pick just the right background details that illuminate the characters’ lives at that particular moment. What Fogarty creates in his first, wonderfully readable and poignant collection (one of many collections*, I hope): short fictions (and sometimes short-short) that nevertheless contain entire worlds, universes in which folks perhaps like you and me — brothers, lovers, losers, mothers, fathers — trudge through heartbreak and loss and — to pull a word from the title — a deep sense of loneliness.
*That said, the novella The Dead Dream of Being Undead, counter-intuitively but, in retrospect, smartly placed in the center of the collection, hints at the possibility of a larger manuscript with many moving parts. Novel or a second collection, I’m along for the ride.
First, the guy is a lawyer. A practicing lawyer. I don’t mean a guy who plays one on TV — though that would be cool too — but a lawyer-lawyer. (I don’t know if he gets to stand up in court and argue in front of juries, but still.)
Second, turn to the copyright page, right under the “This is a work of fiction” disclaimer. Check out the paragraph that begins “Matthew Fogarty’s stories have been widely published.” What follows is a list of what seems like a couple dozen lit journals, some big, some small, where the stories originally appeared. Writers should all be so committed to the discipline, of submission, of placing one’s work at the feet of different editors. The man is an inspiration.
One thing that elevates Fogarty’s stories is that his empathy, his generosity of spirit, extends to the unexpected: Elvis impersonators, dinosaurs, Bigfoot, zombies, Andre the Giant, stagecoach marshals, astronauts, and of course, robots and mermaids. Folks perhaps like you and me. In the hands of a lesser writer this might be mere whimsy, but Fogarty generates these piercing moments of humanity from this unlikely assemblage of characters. Taken as a whole, one can’t help but admire the finesse, the facility, in which Fogarty moves between the different settings.
One of the challenges of writing flash is about never overstaying one’s welcome. To cut just before the denouement the reader has to imagine in her head, to resist the temptation to connect the dots, to pick just the right background details that illuminate the characters’ lives at that particular moment. What Fogarty creates in his first, wonderfully readable and poignant collection (one of many collections*, I hope): short fictions (and sometimes short-short) that nevertheless contain entire worlds, universes in which folks perhaps like you and me — brothers, lovers, losers, mothers, fathers — trudge through heartbreak and loss and — to pull a word from the title — a deep sense of loneliness.
*That said, the novella The Dead Dream of Being Undead, counter-intuitively but, in retrospect, smartly placed in the center of the collection, hints at the possibility of a larger manuscript with many moving parts. Novel or a second collection, I’m along for the ride.
haylimayli's review against another edition
4.0
Filled with delightful essays on imaginative topics, some loaded with levity and others with darker themes, this book of stories (and a novella) left me wanting more.
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