Alexandra Chasin - Her characters distribute their kisses indiscriminately, however, she is more promiscuous in form than in content

Alexandra Chasin, Kissed By (Fiction Collective 2, 2007)

"This work is a collection of innovation fictions that range widely in form and style. Alexandra Chasin's remarkable stories employ forms as diverse as cryptograms (in "ELENA=AGAIN") and sentence diagrams (in "Toward a Grammar of Guilt") to display her interest in fiction as a form constituted by print on the page, every bit as much as poetry. In "They Come From Mars," the words are arrayed on the page like troops, embodying the xenophobic image of invading armies of immigrants and illegal aliens that animates the narrative. One story incorporates personal ads ("Lynette, Your Uniqueness"), another is organized alphabetically ("2 Alphabets"), while another leaves sentences unfinished ("Composer and I"). A number of stories take metafictional turns, calling attention to the process of writing itself. The last piece in the collection plays with genre distinctions, including an index of first lines and a general index. Set in New York, New England, Paris, and Morocco, these tales are narrated by men and women, old and young, gay, straight, and bisexual; one narrator is not a person at all, but a work of art. Each of these deft, playful, and sometimes anarchic fictions is different from the others, yet all are the unmistakable offspring of the same wildly inventive imagination. Chasin's diction is precise and purposeful, yet it retains a colloquialism that enables a dialogue with the reader. Humorous and heart-wrenching, often all at once, Kissed By offers the sort of acute insight evoked through the interplay of empathy and intellect."

"Formal adventurousness, anarchy, wordplay, and intellectual sophistication... there is a great deal of authority in this writing... superb." -R.M. Berry

"Until I read Kissed By, Alexandra Chasin's marvelous collection, I never understood what the term 'experimental fiction' really meant. Now I get it. Chasin enters each story as if it's her laboratory. She has the great gift of being able to bring us along on her investigation; she seems to hold up each sentence for our inspection. It's thrilling to watch Chasin as she pours her chemicals to find out what will fizz and what will explode." - Pagan Kennedy

"A tour de force of pieces about love and longing and language, but mostly longing, deferred desire at both a thematic and structural stratum... beautiful narrative mutations... bright, whimsical linguistic wrenchings... luminosities..." - Lance Olsen

"With an alchemy entirely her own, Alexandra Chasin turns indexes into poetry, flips love inside out, and fixes her dissecting, tender gaze on both the minutiae and vastness of the world. Strange birds, these stories, to show up in your neighborhood - and how they sing." - Elizabeth Graver

"Some readers will agree with a blurb on the back of Kissed By that labels Alexandra Chasin’s debut work of fiction “experimental.” It’s not as if experimental writers can be easily profiled, separated from the main stream of writers into a straggly line leading to a holding area where authoritarian Contract novelists inspect the baggage of shadowy literary figures who require detention. Gabriel Josipovici stated in an essay that reviewers view experimental writing as “a sub-branch of fiction, rather like teenage romances or science fiction perhaps...” and Gilbert Sorrentino regarded the word as a “euphemism for that work which cannot be called ‘serious.’” Chasin is an exploratory writer. The eighteen pieces in Kissed By roughly divide into those that plunge into the cerebral, the composition of the work being the narrative, and those replete with deep, mature emotion. “Toward a Grammar of Guilt” and “Composer and I” are examples of the first category, where we can enjoy Chasin’s political engagement and inventiveness; “B. & G. & I” and “Lynette, Your Uniqueness” exhibit bitterness, wit, and a delighted enjoyment found in listening to sounds and converting them into language. This is not simple play with language because one can—the flaw marring “They Come From Mars” (each word four letters long) and “Kant Get Enough” (filled with puns)—but because it’s fun to let the imagination go its merry way. This collection is most serious for being at times humorous, allowing for contrasts and juxtapositions of mood. In Chasin’s world, her lovelorn or lovesick creations can hear birds say “Cheater. Cheater. Cheater. Cheater... Read. Weepweep. Read. Weepweep” and make one feel a tug of recognition as well as an appreciation of a truly fine ear." - Jeff Bursey

"Kissed By Alexandra Chasin begins with wordplay in its title and ends with wordplay in its index. In between are 18 short fictional pieces, a lot of kissing, and too many puns. Her characters - gay, straight, and bisexual - distribute their kisses indiscriminately. However, Chasin is more promiscuous in form than in content. The chief pleasure in reading her short stories (or whatever they are) is watching their forms unfold. The most inventive and playful piece is the last, "Toward a Grammar of Guilt," a recollection of 9/11 and its aftermath told entirely in sentence diagrams. Another story, "They Came From Mars," looks at first glance like the work of a monomaniac playing with a typewriter, but it turns out to be a weirdly cryptic account of an invasion of malodorous aliens. The piece is one part Ed Wood, one part M. Night Shyamalan, and one part Georges Bataille. There's only one scatological story, and that's about a woman whose love life consists entirely of sex with philosophers. Poor Schlegel would be horrified to learn how he appears in the story, and you may wince at Karl Marx being reduced to a pun, but the scatology is a sly reference to the mind/body problem.
Kissed By is published by the Fiction Collective 2, so you know its form is aggressively innovative. In my experience experimental fiction writers tend to fall in love with their formal conceits while neglecting the content, which too often is flat and unimaginative. A good argument can be made for this arrangement, however. The French avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920's deliberately grafted experimental montage onto simple, even melodramatic stories. Still, much indie fiction shares the same subject matter: the messy love lives of the underemployed. The stories are interchangeable: an arty type with a jobette falls in love with a charismatic but flawed person. The relationships never work out, and in the end the arty type is wiser but no less blocked. Chasin's "Composer and I" and "B & G & I" fit this model. Interestingly, they're also among the most conventional of her stories. Conversely, the most moving piece is "Two Alphabets," which tells the story of a man reunited with his son shortly before the son is killed in a car accident. The plot proceeds alphabetically so that we glimpse the awful ending, then glide right past it.
A truly experimental writer should be at their best when he or she is experimenting, and Chasin is just such a writer. The pieces never overstay their welcome; as soon as the form has unfolded completely, the story promptly ends, a sign of a witty intelligence. Humor bursts forth in unexpected places, such as when a woman hopelessly torn between two lovers consults a psychic, who tersely advises her, "Get a job." When a clueless guest wonders why a tapenade has to have olives, the host snaps, "Otherwise, the whole concept has no specificity." Moments like these, when we get slapped awake, are exactly what innovative fiction should provide." - Richard Prouty

"The ideal reader of Alexandra Chasin's wonderful - and wonder-full - debut collection of "innovative fictions", Kissed By, is no slouch. He has work to do. She can't pass over a single word in a Chasin story, for to skip or skim would be to miss something vital. And yet at the same time, Chasin's reader has to approach many of her fictions in a similar way to a viewer looking at a Magic Eye picture: you have to relax focus so that the image will appear before you in all its glory. This sounds complicated. It's not. Just pay attention. If you do, you will be well rewarded.
Chasin's stories are the sort to have terms like "experimental" or "meta-fiction" thrown at them, but I would rather not do that so as not to put anyone off. This is not "worthy" fiction that you "must read" because of the fact that it is "innovative". Let's just talk about the stories, of which there are 18 in this book published by FC2, the Fiction Collective 2, "an author-run, not-for-profit publisher of artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction".
In the first story, Kissed By, Chasin immediately signals that we are in non-traditional territory. The main character, it seems, is a figure in a painting, who is rather angry that the painter hasn't given him/her a face, and longs to be kissed. The opening paragraph is unsettling: "I began, as we all do, by wanting something. I began by wanting somebody, everybody, nobody, to know that I wanted something, but I hardly knew which."
Chasin often seems to be telling a story and, at the same time, talking about the telling of the story; neither interfere with the other. This, I think, is why it is necessary to pay attention and to relax focus simultaneously. If you think too hard about it all, this could have disastrous consequences. For example, in The Mystery of Which Mystery, the author is wondering about the kind of mystery the story needs, while bringing us the very story that needs the mystery, the love story of Leo and Lise. The added layer makes this fairly pedestrian plot more compelling, maybe more so to a writer who enjoys access to an author's machinations or pseudo-machinations!
As with Lise Erdrich's collection, Night Train, there is a story here that could be seen as purporting to explain the writer and her process. In Composer and I, the narrator is a writer who is plagued by the Composer inside her head who wants to write all the time: "This is the bane of my existence. Since I was a teenager I have been afflicted with a narrator who offers - no, imposes - a running commentary on everything I hear, smell, touch, taste, feel, or do. This irrepressible composer mediates every last experience - fights with my Dad in the great backyard, cityscapes in the dusk, hot sex, backgammon victories, losses in love, brushing my teeth, endlessly driving on roads, and cetera, ad infinitum."
Maybe it is Chasin's own Composer who, in stories such as The Mystery of Which Mystery, insists not only on writing the story but on writing about the writing of the story. And after reading the whole collection, it appeared to me that perhaps the attempt to silence - or, at least, to distract - Composer for a while, might lie behind some of the most wacky of the fictions here. Such as They Come From Mars. An extract (in the same font as the original):
Then they walk pour flow ooze down town rows upon rows flow
folk from Mars rows upon rows like ants Dont obey when City
Hall says dont Then wewe spec they want fear they want TAKE
OVER TAKE OVER Wewe spec fear that what they want they want
from usus Come from Mars this flow ants that want what wewe
have rite here What Dont Mars have nice down town nice life
This is most definitely innovative, and requires much concentration, but the effect is not to simply hear about but to feel the rows of Martians marching, bearing down on you as you read, messing with your brain. It's more a sort of sensory bombardment than a short story.
There are some fictions whose innovation were wasted on this reader, such as ELENA=AGAIN. I am a frequent solver of cryptic crosswords, but after spending much time on this fiction, I failed to crack it. When it was originally published in DIAGRAM it was accompanied by a note: "As a rule, readers create a text in the moment that they read it; readers render a text meaningful in the very act of reading, regardless of the form of the text. This cryptogram is a formal experiment in pushing this axiom to its logical limit. It is an inquiry into readerly activity, whose results its putative writer will never know... paradoxically."
'Toward Grammar of Guilt' requires turning the page to read words written sideways down branches of a sort of family-tree-like structure. Clever. Yes. Also Kant Get Enough was basically just puns on philosopher's names, which was amusing but not much more.
As someone who enjoys non-traditional fiction, I was surprised that the stories that I was taken with the most in this book are the ones that are probably the closest to traditional, with just small twists in their fabric. In B., G., and I the narrator is torn between two lovers, one male and one female, B. and G., and is forced by them to decide on just one. Composer and I is also a straightforwardly-told tale.
What comes through very clearly in this collection is an author who feels wondrously free from constraints, be they linguistic, grammatical, temporal, spatial. Chasin also seems to feel free not to be innovative, which to me is the greatest aspect of this collection: she does what she believes serves the story she is telling. And by doing so, she enriches our concepts of narrative. I look forward to reading much more of her work." - Tania Hershman

"The opening sentence of Alexandra Chasin’s Kissed By reads like a line from the first chapter of an odd sort of origin text: “I began as we all do, by wanting something, but I hardly knew what.” And indeed it is a fitting point of origin, because it establishes the creative impulse behind the rest of the work. With this sentence, Chasin introduces into the book the word want and its numerous meanings; includes us, her readers, in the wanting; and admits to a certain lack of knowledge on her part: what do we want? Those familiar with Chasin’s work, or with the writing of her fellow FC2 authors, will appreciate this honesty, for not only does it allow Chasin the liberty of seeking the what through the written word, but also it means that we are welcome to join her. If there is anything for which Chasin does not want, then, it is a sense of language and all of its possibility.
The book consists of eighteen experimental texts, each varying in degrees of accessibility, each exploring the idea of want. The more accessible texts rely upon basic structural elements to move the story along, as in a series of want ads or a letter to the editor, while the oddest examples sprawl across the entire page in their search for narrative, as in “They Come From Mars,” in which columns of four letter words march down the paper in a formation reminiscent of the video game Space Invaders:
'Then they walk pour flow ooze down town rows upon rows flow
folk from Mars rows upon rows like ants Dont obey when City
Hall says dont Then wewe spec they want fear they want TAKE
OVER TAKE OVER Wewe spec fear that what they want they want
from usus Come from Mars this flow ants that want what wewe
have rite here What Dont Mars have nice down town nice life'
As we read this particular story, the rhythm of the columns, the odd way Chasin breaks up multi-syllabic words into nearly incoherent fragments, and the recurring visual pattern on each page climax with an alarming hate rant against Martian aliens, which have actually, we soon discover, come peacefully in order to satisfy a desire to be a part of a better society, to make a better life for themselves. Where, then, does that place us, the readers, who suddenly find challenged our own expectations of good and evil? What do we want?
Here, Chasin wants to challenge our own expectations, our expectations about fiction, about meaning, about language, and she does so by involving us in the process. Each story asks of us to bring to bear upon its completion our own interpretive abilities. “ELENA = AGAIN,” “Potatoes, You Ask,” and “Towards a Grammar of Guilt,” the beautiful sentence diagrams of which had me revisiting my old 7th grade grammar textbook, are perhaps the purest examples of this urge to collaborate. Of “ELENA = AGAIN,” a text encrypted through the use of a substitution cipher and first published in the online journal DIAGRAM, Chasin writes:
'As a rule, readers create a text in the moment that they read it; readers render a text meaningful in the very act of reading, regardless of the form of the text. This cryptogram is a formal experiment in pushing this axiom to its logical limit. It is an inquiry into readerly activity, whose results its putative writer will never know... paradoxically.'
As I deciphered “ELENA = AGAIN” on a sheet of loose leaf notebook paper, I experienced the act of reading a story in a completely new way. The text appeared before me piece by piece, and despite my still lacking many letters, my experience as a reader allowed my mind to understand the narrative in its fullest sense, much like how the eye will fill in the missing parts of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle to create a whole picture. I was pleased to find that Elena was not only a key to the cipher, but also a character in the narrative.
Even the less experimental of the texts meet Chasin’s requirements necessary to create meaning because they leave enough for an active reader to explore on her own. The most touching of these stories is “Two Alphabets,” a story narrated by an estranged father grieving over the loss of his son to a drunk-driving accident and in which each group of lines begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Here in the W section, we find some of Chasin’s clearest, most emotional language in the entire book:
'When I thought that his visits, filled with arguments but also camping and lessons in packing and laying a mud brick with hair and straw knit up in it, and, more recently, Scrabble, which he brought two trips ago—when I thought that those visits were proof that you can never lose a child even if you abandon him, I was as yet totally untutored in loss.'
Even these simple details give us the ability to create meaning on our own. We imagine the narrator and his son arguing over the breakup of the family, and we understand how the mud brick symbolizes the reconstruction of their relationship. We picture the father and his doomed son kneeling over the neat tiles of a half-full Scrabble board, having suddenly assembled words out of the chaos of language, and we realize that here is a narrator sadly struggling to understand what it means to want, to be without, by way of reciting for us the alphabet of his life.
As an experimental work of literature, Kissed By is one of many such books that should inspire in its readers a desire to seek out a more active role in the creative process. Those hesitant to approach such experimental writing should know that Chasin has made room for them in her work. They should take encouragement from Chasin’s thoughts about the relationship between the reader, the text, and its author—these thoughts, which do not strike me as particularly experimental or innovative, suggest that she writes with a sharp awareness of her reader, an awareness that protects her work from the coldness of heart often attributed to failed experimental writing. And the more adventurous readers, who have come to this review expecting an affirmation of their thoughts, already know that there exist numerous opportunities in a book like this for the reader to learn the language of want. What these readers will find, then, is this: Chasin, its author, is a gifted tutor."- Ryan Call

"I finished reading Alexandra Chasin's experimental fiction collection Kissed By a day or two ago, and it's been in my thoughts quite a bit since. It's a very inventive, interesting collection, and a challenge to read in all the best ways. A lot of the stories are initially hard to get into, but given time teach you how to read them and how to understand what they're doing. Luckily, Chasin's writing is excellent at a pure sentence level, offering plenty of time to settle into each story. Ryan Call recently reviewed the book for The Quarterly Conversation, and goes into way more depth than I'm capable of, so I'll point you over there for more information about this intriguing collection.
Here's a short excerpt, from Chasin's "all kinds of people on the Q train":
'rattling horizontal in the subway car, one gazes one dozes another drifts off, but the junkie always nods. nods on the subway nods in the waiting room nods at the wheel of the car, and nods at home with the television up too loud to think while a child pulls at her sleeve, mommy wake up, i'm hungry. but it's always a waiting room wherever she is, and she's always nodding. off.

we rattling along we know the nods. it's not a nap.

the camel coat on my right elbows the high heels to his right silently to say, look at the child. the child breathes on the window blacked by the racing headlong flashlight tunnel walls and draws an O in the greasy condensation of her breath.

some like it nap some like it nod. the child turns to her mother slumping like some cilium in a lung, turns away, and says to the graffiti above her head, let's pretend we're in a spaceship." - Matt Bell

Sean Lovelace - Leukemia is a disease wherein the white cells run amuck and drink too much cheap beer, urinate in public and hang from motel balcony

Sean Lovelace, How Some People Like Their Eggs (Rose Metal Press, 2009)

«How Some People Like Their Eggs is a collection of 10 flash fictions about things falling apart, wrung out wrong, raveling and unraveling, from missing woodchucks to train-struck ferrets, from Bonnie and Clyde to Charlie Brown (a notorious fatalist and depressive), from meteorites to bear attacks to gunplay in the bait shop. And so on to flash fiction worlds of talking crows, percolating trees, Che Guevara’s omelets, and Ingrid Bergman’s sex life. These stories are light and yet succulent like a Cornish hen, whatever that means. How does an amphibian know the moment it’s OK to unfold the lungs? Wait. These stories are small but so is a hydrogen atom. Open these pages, split them apart, and BOOM. There you go. Enjoy.»

“Lovelace takes on Destiny, Luck, and Fate in How Some People Like Their Eggs. His little stories seek out these big-guy concepts and bring them down like in an old movie filled with gangsters, trench coats, cigarettes, and tough-talking women with nice legs—using smart dialogue and wit.”— Sherrie Flick

«Sean Lovelace is clever. His chapbook How Some People Like Their Eggs, the winner of the 2009 Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest, is brimming with shrewd, energetic comparisons: two people aimlessly walk “like two paper cups blown across a grassy courtyard”; bubbles in beer rise “like glass elevators”; a pamphlet makes someone’s grip feel like “pin-pulled grenades.” Leukemia is described as a “disease wherein the white cells run amuck and drink too much cheap beer and urinate in public and hang from motel balconies and generally harm themselves and others like teenagers on spring break in Florida.” And all this comes from the opening story.
Sean Lovelace is funny. Here he offers excerpts from Charlie Brown’s diary. Yes, that Charlie Brown, the bald kid with a beagle named, well, you know. CB wakes up each day to “birds coughing” and reflects that his familiar refrain Good grief is “[a]n oxymoron, or maybe life.” Then there’s the story of a guy obsessed with bocce, who feels like “a cloud in someone else’s dream.” With inimitable style, Lovelace describes a stomach as “flopping like a halibut in an ice chest,” and rain falling on a roof “like a giant herd of tiny, tiny horses running circles of free-living gallop.”
In the title story, Lovelace describes how General Patton, Yogi Berra, Andy Warhol, Howard Hughes, Bonnie Parker, and Archduke (take a breath) Franz Ferdinand Karl Anikò Belschwitz Mòric Bálint Szilveszter Gömpi Maurice Bzoch János Frajkor Ludwig Josef von Habsburg-Lothringen (why Giuermo, Strezpek, Pinche, and van Haverbeke are left off is never answered) like their eggs served. For instance, Billie Holiday likes hers
Sunny Side Up, inverted. Like two dreams dropped from a great height. Big and round and shiny and flat. Served with a glass of rusty tap water. Served fourteen minutes after cooking. While cooling. While cool.
And most astutely of all, Lovelace, recognizing the famed genius’s inscrutability, observes that “[n]o human being knows how Thelonius Monk likes his eggs.”
Blood Sisters video Sean Lovelace slips easily between fantasy and reality, enough to make your own world spin. Besides members of the Peanuts gang, Ingrid Bergman makes a salacious appearance in “A Sigh is Just a Sigh.” You’ll also find Humphrey Bogart, admonishing that “a man needs to face what he’s made for himself.” In another story, a lawnmower gives a man “a don’t-even-think-about-it” look. How convincing the pathetic (remember the term is not pejorative) fallacies, how easy to suspend disbelief here.
And while Lovelace is a trickster and a jokester, he’s also empathetic, for even when his stories pirouette, go pyrotechnic, and slip the stream, he goes beneath the surfaces of things and finds as much gold as he does mud, lava, and earthworms. In “Crow Hunting,” Lovelace waxes lyrical and the results are masterful. You can’t help but sway to this line describing reappearing crows: “that final image, spiraling frame, buckling wings and heart, the curvature of returning.” Like Anne Sexton’s eggs, these stories “bloom and bleed.” And if you squint, you too might just see “a peony, a water clock, a lioness clutching at a crow,” swimming inside of them.
You could call these short stories, “short shorts,” without, of course, that Nair commercial from the eighties rattling your brain case; better yet, call these “flash fictions.” Actually, no, these are the word made flash. To tweak a Hilaire Belloc quote, “just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable,” so it is with fiction. And with How Some People Like Their Eggs we get the best of both feasts: culinary and literary.» —John Madera

«It has been said the hallmark of a great cook is one who can prepare the perfect egg. Eggs are tricky little things, particularly because it seems so simple. Boil in water. Fry in pan. Fry in pan while vigorously beating the egg about. Whisk in bowl then pour in pan with other delicious ingredients. But eggs are temperamental. Timing matters. The heat of the pan matters. The quality of your ingredients matters. There’s nothing at all easy about eggs. Writing is the same way. If you are literate, you can put some words together and call it writing but for it to make sense, for it to do more than act as words on a page, you have to be a great writer.
The ten stories in Sean Lovelace’s chapbook How Some People Like Their Eggs, winner of the Rose Metal Press Third Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest, evidence the work of a great writer. Each story is unique in voice but not so different that the stories feel like they’ve been written by different writers. In many chapbooks, you get the sense you’re reading the same story differently. That was not the case here.
The stories in this collection start as one thing and end up as something completely different. Meteorite begins with a brief narrative about the only recorded meteorite to hit a human but quickly evolves into a story of two people at a restaurant that serves bad food. One of them has been stricken with cancer. The other doesn’t know what to say. There is wonderful subtlety in this story. For example,”Paige eats everything and says her stomach kind of hurts and I say I bet it kind of hurts. She says I’d win that bet and then orders the entire dessert menu, including an ice cream pie called Chocolate to Die For.” There is so much subtext in those two lines given the context of the story. It a masterful choice of words and a brilliant way to make the most of a short short form. Throughout the collection I was impressed by the deliberate use of language.
Charlie Brown’s Diary: Excerpts is clever, charming and unexpected. The tone of it captures Charlie Brown’s melancholic neuroses and while not everyone may read the story this way, I found it terribly moving and more than anything that’s always what I want from stories. I want to be moved. The title story is equally witty and moving, instructing how various figures take their eggs. You may be interested to know Che Guevara likes a bold omelet while Howard Hughes would like his steam-based in an autoclave.
My favorite story in the chapbook is I Love Bocce, about a nurse who loves bocce and yearns to have people understand the depth and earnestness of his feelings. Over an operating table, the doctors and nurses in attendance begin discussing the merits of bocce when an oveerager medical student says, “I played in Haiti, with coconuts, during a tournament. I actually grouped the balls so close that several laws of physics were altered.” His futile statement is ignored and understood for what it is. Surgery continues. It is a perfect moment in a series of perfect moments throughout the story.
Ultimately, this collection is witty, at times tender, at times magical, but always a fine example of how wonderful short short stories are when well-executed. In reading How Some People Like Their Eggs, I was reminded of Mozart and the Marriage of Figaro and how in one scene the score moves from aria to duet to trio to quartet to quintet until twenty voices are singing in perfect harmony. This collection is like that composition. Every word, every sentence, every story work together in perfect harmony.
I am allergic to eggs. When I eat them I get nauseous and itchy and sick in ways you don’t want to read about. When I could eat eggs, I enjoyed them scrambled a bit soft (not hard scrambled, dry and flaky), with a bit of raw salt and pepper. I also enjoyed hard boiled eggs because I liked to remove the hardened yolk in one piece and pretend it was a marble. That’s weird. I know. But now you know how I like my eggs. It was inevitable, that.» - Roxane Gay

«If I was Sean Lovelace, I might begin my review in the persona of Humphrey Bogart, Snoopy or a tree that grows coffee pots, enticing you in with the comic and seemingly preposterious, and then, once I have ensnared you, hitting you with something far darker, leaving an indelible impression. Such are Lovelace's short short stories. Don't be fooled by his pretty-sounded surname, he is not going to let you off easily.Thank goodness.
How Some People Like Their Eggs is an excellent example of the impact of the order of stories in a collection. I began the first story, Meteorite, having never read anything by Lovelace. The first paragraph tells of the "only recorded meteorite to actually hit a human being", the human in question being "a woman with hair wrapped high like a hornet's nest". I wondered where this might go. Lovelace lulls you gently for a moment, then leukemia is mentioned and you are suddenly aware that you are not where you expected, that this is not funny. But Lovelace does not wallow in pathos. This story is deeply real, made up of aborted attempts at conversation, apparent tangents that are not tangential ("two sorority girls stroll by looking absolutely themselves"), the most ridiculous ("The Ten Commandments for Cancer Survival") and an ending which, in saying so little, says everything.
What beginning with this story does is set the tone for the other 9 stories, the longest of which is six (smaller than normal) pages. The reader now expects oddities not just for comedy's sake, but accompanied by a punch in the gut, a more disturbing message.
It may be a cliche, but Lovelace does more in a few pages than many a "short" story writer I have encountered. I think it would be a disservice to attempt to precis any of the short shorts here, and a shame to spoil the delight of coming to them fresh. I will say that flash fiction lends itself extremely well to being re-read again and again to probe it further. I read the book straight through, then dipped in and out, and then read it again in a different order, the first story and then the last, the second and the second-to-last, working my way to the middle of the book.
Lovelace's writing makes excellent use of repetition: in Meteorite, for example, there are three mentions in three pages of cups, paper and plastic, a symbol, perhaps, of emptiness and disposability?; in Charlie Brown's Diary: Excerpts, each diary entry begins with the same bizarre phrase: "I wake, and hear the birds coughing". His openings can bowl you over: "My girlfriend was home from work, at least two hours late, and three inches shorter, which meant it had been a tough day." (Molasses).
There were one or two stories that didn't leave as indelible a mark as the rest, and I wondered if perhaps it was because I didn't follow certain American pop cuture references, or whether I had read them all too quickly without pausing, or simply because taste is subjective and I don't think I have ever enjoyed or been moved by every single story in a collection.
Sean Lovelace is an author whose work I shall definitely seek out, now that I've been formally introduced. Lovelace is a professor of creative writing, and I envy his students, having a teacher whose own writing is one of the clearest examples of creativity I've had the pleasure to review.» - Tania Hershman

"Cher orders her eggs coddled. Snoopy indulges in uncomfortable underwater sex. Marilyn Monroe sates her tastebuds with the cotton from an asthma inhaler. In his first chapbook of short short fiction, Sean Lovelace weaves the desires of pop-culture icons into an essentially sad, everyday world that anticipates death at every moment. The ten shorts of this collection open with a meteorite that strikes a woman in the thigh; whether it is divine providence or simply chance is a question that reverberates throughout the chapbook.
In the strongest story, “A Sigh Is Just a Sigh,” a husband and wife argue over whether anyone actually utters the immortal “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca. The answer (no) is not important. As if in their own private movie, commandeering full editorial control, Lovelace’s characters revise their lives at will. Ingrid Bergman seduces the husband in four separate lines of dialogue, like different takes improvised for a DVD gag reel. Another man works through many responses to his friend’s leukemia, until he settles on silence.
But Lovelace presents all of these alternate dimensions as if all the choices were possible, the roads less traveled as clear as the ones taken. The final story, “Endings,” offers multiple conclusions for some of its victims: “On the way home they either stop by Starbucks, run out of gas, or explode.” Cappuccino and combustion carry the same weight. Like a choose-your-own-adventure game, the ending is inevitable, yet which ending ultimately comes to pass doesn’t really matter.
These characters see what they want, imagining fictions such as a Hollywood fog sweeping through the mise-en-scène. A surgeon who “wasn’t well” starts a conversation during operation about loving bocce; it seems too absurd to have happened, yet it’s how he remembers it. The whole is greater than its parts: some stories feel disjointed (”Molasses”) or, in the case of “Charlie Brown’s Diary: Excerpts,” too precocious to be truly clever. But even Charlie Brown is aware he’s a mere cartoon somehow existing in our world. Lovelace writes about daily, mundane things-from Wal-Marts and traffic accidents to how eggs are cooked-then asks, is that what real life’s about?" - Joshua Garstka

An excerpt:
http://www.rosemetalpress.com/Catalog/Lovelaceexcerpt.pdf


Sean Lovelace, "So, This Is Drink" (in Diagram http://thediagram.com/6_6/lovelace.html )

«I do not know if Sean Lovelace considers himself a poet or a fiction writer, or if he thinks the twelve numbered sections of "So, This Is Drink" are poems or stories. I don’t know that it matters outside of the most academic circles, those who concern themselves with genre and school instead of just reading a piece, just listening to it, feeling the movement beneath the stark black letters. From the first section through the last, Lovelace’s prose sparkles, piling images upon images, going back, cutting forward, always retaining the razor’s edge of the writer’s vital wit. "So, This Is Drink" is divided into twelve sections, and this is the first:
As for kinship, my liver. (It whispers in my sleep.) As for bedding, a futon mattress and floor. As for music, Frank Sinatra, who sings, "Alcohol is your enemy, but you should love your enemies." As for drink, one Mexican beer in the refrigerator. The linoleum sags under pyramids of empty cabernet. Amber quart bottles squat in cobweb corners, their silvery caps astray, thrown sparks of phosphorous, spinning beneath the stove, under bookshelves, wadded shirts, the waxy gravy of the kitchen sink. The blender is cracked, swollen with residue, a milky orange sky, then clear demarcation, a horizon, most likely rum. The sun fills the room; sweat pulls from my skin. I squint; the windows glare yellow, mean—they bellow light. The sun wears the face of Jesus. The sun says, "Name my first miracle."
"Name my first miracle" is a hell of a way to start a story (and an easy question, if you’re a good Catholic boy like myself). Like the biblical water turned to wine, Lovelace’s story is full of hallucinatory changelings: "The bottles... morphed, this morning, into artillery shells," "Vodka is translucent for an instant, frozen, a flicker of time. It then turns to blueberries, which immediately ferment, and the shadows of black swans appear..." Just as Christ’s first miracle began his transformation from man into God, so do the transformations surrounding the narrator signal his descent into alcoholic delusion.
Each section brings with its own mood, its own rules. Section 5 has an orderly feel to it, the categorizing examination of a life, "the power of a routine"—it is one of two sections that contains a list, exhibiting surety instead of confusion, a reckoning of what has been lost so far. In this section there are also preferences disguised as rules, such as "Green glass is a good glass. I like to tip twenty percent, always. I like jukeboxes and girls with vertical hair. Summer, light beer; winter stout." There are proper ways to conduct oneself, even at this stage. There are methods to the madness, if it is madness. The following section considers societal rules (as opposed to personal ones), disregarding the ones that get in the way of the narrator’s drinking in favor of looser propositions.
As the work continues, we eventually reach the twelfth section, a midnight exposure where the narrator prays to be hidden, asking for someone to "hide me. Hide me tufted, in a foxhole, limbs tight. Hide me naked below a pile of musty quilts, a willow, or a stream-side oak; let my energy enter its roots, transfer—Newton's law." There is no conclusion here, no answers to the confusion and despair that has invaded the work from the first sentence onwards. Instead it ends with a series of cyclical images, suggesting not an end to drink, to despair, to loneliness, but instead an inevitable repeat of the day’s complications. In Lovelace’s story, there is no search for redemption or epiphany—Instead there is only the paranoid, hopefully peering through dirty windows at a world slowly getting drunk, slowly passing out, sad and lonely, watching and waiting for something to change.» - Matt Bell