Tiny Grievances - Thomson, Robert

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Résumé :
Tiny Grievances is a collection of mostly gay-themed short stories and a novella, Inside The Scar Circle. Thomson returns to familiar, fertile ground with these stories about troubled and failing urban lives, fractured families, broken friendships, community, questioning the status quo, belonging, ageing, and the search for love in a world geared toward quick fixes. At turns uproariously funny, poignant and genuinely moving, these stories take you deep into the souls of everyday people trying to survive. Accomplished, assured and gripping, Robert Thomson's Tiny Grievances tears apart the hilarity, humiliation and tragedy of human tribulation. From a genteel aunt exhibiting odd behaviour to a man stalking a former lover even as he knows he shouldn't, Thomson's characters are real, biting and very memorable. (Jared Mitchell, author of Mayhem and Becky Chan) The Ballad Of Aunt Stabby chronicles a disastrous dinner party as two pretentious hosts try to distract their misfit guests from an opinionated aunt who arrives beaten and bleeding. I'll Wait Here. Two friends with benefits find themselves at a casual crossroads when one man loses his job and the other, surprisingly, is empathetic and supportive about the situation. Smoking. It's about the urge that makes you want to smoke. Three Words Away is about lost love and regret. After more than a decade, a man spots an ex-lover and gets caught up in an imaginary reunion. Hide Everything details the ripple effect caused by a gay man's failed suicide attempt. Stalking Harold Greenbaum is a dramatic comedy about how the friendship between two middle-aged women is shattered when one of them renovates herself in order to win the love of a co-worker. In This Functional Family an introverted gay man must stand up against his conniving sociopathic sister when the two reunite after the death of their step-mother. A long-distance S/M relationship is on the rocks and Platform reveals the inner workings of the slave as he contemplates ending the relationship with his Master. Tiny Grievances. Two childhood friends are reunited; both are raw and broken and neither one of them is in a position to help the other. Stopping Quitting chronicles one man's attempt to stop smoking by exploring semantics and undergoing a spiritual awakening. Inside The Scar Circle is a novella about friendship, community, alienation, and which cocktail goes with what outfit. After a failed relationship, a loner, on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, finds himself part of a clique and begins to examine his identity as a gay man.

Biographie:
Robert Thomson is a writer and editor from Toronto, Canada. His first book Secret Things was released in 1993. A second, revised edition came out the following year. It was at this time that he began working as a journalist, editor and managing editor at a number of local magazines. Through the mid-to-late 1990s, Robert's short fiction was published in various anthologies: Queer View Mirror, Brothers Of The Night: Gay Vampire Stories, Quickies 2, Best Gay Erotica 1998, Queer View Mirror 2, Happily Ever After: Erotic Fairy Tales for Men and Quickies 3. Need, his second book of short fiction was scheduled for release at the beginning of 2000, but the publisher's US distributor closed its doors due to bankruptcy the same week that the entire print run arrived at their warehouse. A number of other personal and professional setbacks prompted him to leave the publishing industry shortly thereafter. Robert worked as a DJ and VJ and lyricist, and began experimenting with video editing software. This lead him to plan, write, film, direct and edit several short films over the next few years, including Text and Last Visit (?ltima visita), which was nominated as Best Short at the 2011 Barcelona GLBT Film Festival. In 2014, both of Robert's titles were re-issued in expanded e-book editions. In June, Secret Things was released, marking its twentieth anniversary. Need was released in December, marking (what would have been) its fifteenth anniversary. HowNow Media published a free-for-a-limited-time sampler of his work called Now... Where Was I? This compilation features stories and excerpts from all of Robert's past and soon-to-be-published titles (Secret Things, Need, Tiny Grievances, Broken, Down, The Co-dependent Cabaret and Rehab). Tiny Grievances, Robert's first book of all-new short stories since 1999, will be published in June of 2016. Robert lives in Toronto, Canada.