Especially the Bad Things

Greg Gerke

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Do you recommend this book?

Yes!

Can a relationship survive on one person's love for a beard? Can Shakespeare protect a doomed romance from an angry bee stuck in a car? How does an old iron speak to affairs of the heart? And how can we gauge the secret yearnings of the woman who writes novels about werewolves?

Wry and absurd, pithy and profound, the short fiction of Greg Gerke takes the pulse of couples arriving at the end of something, lovers entering the "unendurable zone." Moments of improbable grace are salvaged from bitter break-ups, prolonged languor is punctuated by bursts of panic and violence, and the acute pain of thwarted hopes dissipates into indifference. In each of these forty stories, Gerke diagnoses the poisons of heartache with results that pull in two directions at once: comical and grotesque, caustic and humane, sharp-tongued and stirringly sincere.

Book Details

Publisher: Splice
Publish Date: Sep 16th, 2019
Pages: 150
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.00in - 5.25in - 0.35in - 0.39lb
EAN: 9781916173002
Categories: • Short Stories (single author)• Literary

About the Author

Gerke, Greg: - Greg Gerke is the author of Especially the Bad Things and See What I See, both published by Splice.

Praise for this book

Greg Gerke is a short form wizard; dark, funny, and seriously sly. His book will deliver you to new strange thought and feeling.

Sam Lipsyte
author of The Ask, The Fun Parts, and Hark

These swift, swervy, nervous fictions -- as often as not about writers in antic crisis with the language, lovers in trouble with their loves -- are heartachingly hilarious and stocked from margin to margin with agony-born brilliances fresh and revitalizing. Greg Gerke's endearingly self-questioning narrators worry their doubts into a make-do grace that leaves a reader sweetened too.

Gary Lutz
author of Stories in the Worst Way and Divorcer

In this remarkable series of ruefully funny and insightful bursts, Greg Gerke manages to reorder the mundanity of alienation into something urgent and vital.

Sergio de la Pava
author of A Naked Singularity, Personae, and Lost Empress

If you put Lydia Davis and Philip Roth's Portnoy in a blender you might get Greg Gerke's quirkily neurotic, hilariously honest voice.

Susan Shapiro
author of Lighting Up and What's Never Said

How is it that Greg Gerke's short stories make dislocation, miscommunication, and the anxious knots of the mind seem worthwhile and even kind of fun? Get prepared for a writer who wonderfully navigates bumbling, ordinary life with smart, sharp writing and a big dose of compassion.

Victoria Redel
author of Make Me Do Things