short fictions and transitions
Coming next week!
Thesis Abstract
Trout are Selfish: short fictions and transitions is a collection of short stories and musings about kinship. It’s also a book about shitty men. Notions of sexuality, queerness, innocence, and violence amidst a corporate climate for many title characters serves as a backdrop for the ever-present gothic nature of the fiction. The hybridization of gothic, science-fiction, and corporate language blurs the problematic connotations of genre, while also using each respective canon to assign perspective to the title characters and cultural relation to the stories themselves.
As the stories unfold, characters may cross and meet with one another, as the once noble but now sinister and obscure Glover Group takes control over the world, and, most vividly, our title characters, our men. Among the stories are transitions, short musings which take forms resembling fables, or prose-poems, or perhaps something else entirely.
Many stories evoke the supernatural, magical, or scientific as a means of aestheticizing narrative, and, in many cases, provoking the idea that magical elements can be assumed and unsurprising. The magic is a form of queerness, and the queerness of many of the characters, though sometimes relevant to the encapsulating stories, is to be assumed, unsurprising, and as indistinguishable as the magic itself.
Contents
Indignation
The Generosity of Earl Glover
The Garden in Toko Valley
The Castle in the Sea
The Illusions of Acke Karlsson
Pretty Picture, Pretty Tree
The Aff(e)(li)ction of Marco Martín
Great Fall
The Precice Place of Hail Counterpart
The Infatuation of Jaime Coin
Stones
The Shame of Alistair Fletcher
The Adoption of Addison Grace
The Patient Caretaker of Mars
The Complications of Nils Glass
The Afterimage of Patrick Samson
Curio Case, Cloakroom, & Conclusion