HOW TO SURVIVE OVERWHELMING LOSS & LONELINESS IN 5 EASY STEPS
Furnish your new apartment with a homely wooden chair you find abandoned on the sidewalk. It’s like the last puppy left at the pound, the last Christmas tree left in the lot, the last person to stagger out of a singles’ bar: look at it the wrong way and it will collapse. In bars, introduce yourself as Trevor, Nikolai, Hans – all names you wish were yours. When they ask you what you like in bed, tell them: clean sheets.
The risk-taking men & women in this acclaimed collection of 11 short stories are bound together and torn apart by their desire to make sense of life’s breakups and breakdowns.
An eccentric losing her grip on reality tightens her grip on weaponry while "Speed Dating"; a vigilant son searches for clues to his mother’s past in "To Make a Short Story Long"; a Thanksgiving get-together in Manhattan goes cold turkey for a group of recovering addicts on "The Island of Misfit Toys"; a murderess awaiting her sentence conceals a pregnancy in "Surrender, Dorothy"; and in the title story, selected as one of the Best Gay Stories of 2017 by Lethe Press, a desperate man tries miscellaneous pills, miscalculated sex and a misguided self-help manual to get over an ex-love.
Navigating surprising twists and surreal turns, these diverse, volatile, vulnerable characters are all bent on survival in our modern age, diving for change in the deepest of wells.
"How To Survive Overwhelming Loss & Loneliness in 5 Easy Steps" was chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham (THE HOURS) as one of the Top Short Stories in The Tennessee Williams Fiction Contest, and that story continues in MEN IN SHORTS.
This collection also includes "Cherry Bomb", another chapter in the life of VIOLET PEAKS - the eponymous heroine of David James Parr's previous novel.