“In Ryan MacDonald’s stories, most no more than a page in length, we are given glimpses of a father and daughter at the zoo; an isolated man lamenting the absence of TV in his life; two young men atop a fridge at a party, drinking wine. These are stories of marriage and family, of the oddities of the natural world, of college parties, of web-cams and media obsession.
Despite the range of circumstances they reveal, these stories are unified by a brightness of vision, deft observation, and consistently sharp, funny, and unbridled language.”
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“Concise and contrary, exquisite and eccentric, these stories unsettle, then settle, then unsettle again.”
—Susan Steinberg, author of Hydroplane and Spectacle
“The short fiction in Ryan MacDonald’s sublime collection is an adventure. There is so much movement and variety in these tiny stories you’d swear they’re alive. There is gut-punch sadness, gut-bust humor, and cruelty served up so casually it’s disarming…”
“Do you know what the lurid intermixture of complicated emotions produces, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne? That’s right, it produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions. Ryan MacDonald’s glorious shards of prose are both lurid and blazing, and together they comprise an anthology of complex feelings―dream-like, vivid, and never, ever obvious.”
―Chris Bachelder, author of Bear v. Shark and The Throwback Special
Ryan A MacDonald 