Stories, Etc. - Schorb, E. M.

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Résumé :
These previously published stories and short fictions, whether realistic or surreal, are always imaginative and sometimes startling. On the opening page, we meet a man who takes a walk at Coney Island, writes an open letter of confession in the sand, believing it will vanish with the tide, but shockingly discovers that his secrets have been revealed to the world. We find a man who buys a living room carpet that becomes a terrifying jungle and a man who just missed becoming a movie star. There is also the manager of a shop in Harlem whose salesmen peddle portraits of Christ whose eyes seem to follow the viewer and who unconsciously overcomes his racial bias, back in the Sixties. In Bad Trip, a man kidnaps and murders a younger version of himself in the desert and lives to tell the tale. Nothing Forever, C. Kenneth Pellow notes in Writers' Forum where the story first appeared, is constructed almost precisely backwards, although a more useful key to opening the story's meanings may be the metaphor, the trope, embodied in 'AND/OR.' There is a fairy tale about a golden squirrel kidnapped in Czarist Russia and a fable featuring a white stallion whose fierce fight for freedom gives hope to the homeless huddled around a campfire deep in the Great Depression. (This story was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.) Schorb's stories are various in form and style but uniformly entertaining. Enjoy!

Biographie:
E.M. Schorb is a prize-winning poet and novelist. His poetry collection, Murderer's Day, was awarded the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and published by Purdue University Press; his collection, Time and Fevers, was the recipient of the Writer's Digest International Self-Published Award for Poetry and also an Eric Hoffer Award. Other works include 50 Poems, Hill House New York; Reflections in a Doubtful I, White Violet Press; The Journey and Related Poems, Aldrich Press; Words in Passing, The New Formalist Press; The Ideologues and Other Retrospective Poems, Aldrich Press, and The Poor Boy, Dragon's Teeth Press, Living Poets Series. The title poem, The Poor Boy, was awarded the International Keats Poetry Prize by London Literary Editions, Ltd., judged by Howard Sergeant. Schorb's novel, Paradise Square, received the Grand Prize for Fiction from the International eBook Award Foundation at the Frankfurt Book Fair. A Portable Chaos was the First Prize Winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction. But Schorb maintains that he is first and foremost a poet, and his poetry has appeared in hundreds of publications, here and abroad.