Book Review: Jigsaw Youth

Read 5/21/15 -5/27/15
3 Stars - Recommended to fans of gritty, punky, edgy, LGBTQ lit
Pages: 166
Publisher: Ladybox Books
Released: March 2015



Back in January, I helped fund Broken River Books' Year Two March Madness kickstarter. As a backer, I landed my choice of any three ebooks - future or past. Jigsaw Youth looked pretty rad, and it was being released through BRB's Ladybox imprint, so I jumped all over it.

Tiffany Scandal's sophmore novel is a gritty, punky little thing. If it had teeth, it'd be nibbling and gnawing at your fingers as you flipped the pages. It's a sweetly fierce collection of connected vigenettes that tell the semi-life story of Ella, a fledgling queer with a 'sperm donor dad' who has been-there-done-that and had it all done back to her, too.

The novel starts off with a bang, catching Ella knee-deep in a ratty relationship with this chick Hope. Hope is a hopeless cheater and Ella just keeps on taking her back until she absolutely can't take it anymore. I think we've all been in one of those relationships. You know the kind, where you know the person is no good for you, and no good to you, but you just can't ball up enough to walk away and  you end up staying with them for much longer than is healthy.

 "I was telling myself, Please don't do this. Just walk away. But I couldn't. I turned. Hope was a mess. Veiled with tears and snot. Looking like total defeat. Not like the monster I wanted her to be. I got her a tissue from the kitchen."

Im sure you won't be surprised when I tell you that Hope appears here and there throughout the book and you get the feeling that our Ella never quite completely breaks free of whatever hold she had on her.

The next chapter details the night Ella was raped by a guy she thought of as a friend. And it's written as if Ella were writing it for him.

"I woke up to you fucking me. My sweats and underwear around my ankles. Your slender frame and tiny dick wriggling between my legs." 

She brings us along as she showers, once she kicks him out, and as she rages, and as she drags her stinking mattress to his girlfriend's house with a spray painted message for everyone to see.

And it is in this memoir-y way that Tiffany continues to stir and shock us, her readers, with the moments that shaped and scarred Ella... the time she dreamed of Henry Rollins. The day she learned of Kurt Cobain's suicide. The torment she felt when her boss forced her to serve her rapist a cup of coffee, and the elation of catching her boss jerking off into food in the diner's back room. The loss of her childhood best friend when she came out coupled with the overwhelming relief of her family's acceptance. The horrible dating advice her grandmother gave her and her fear of meeting her absentee father face to face for the first time. The lousy relationships she hid in and the nurturing ones she flourished in.

Tiffany Scandal is Lindsay Hunter's literary punk rock sister. Her language is raw and jagged. It is honest and unapologetic. She lays it all out there, in true take-it-or-leave-it fashion. And althought I haven't read her earlier novel, I get the feeling Tiffany is really only just coming into her own. You better watch out world. Scandal is going to be kicking ass and taking names, and I think it's best if you simply step aside and let her.

Celebrating Short Story Month

Did you know May is Short Story Month? I don't know about you, but I've been finding myself reading story collections more and more often over the past few years. It's strange, because it wasn't intentional. When I was younger, I actually used to avoid short stories like the plague. I much preferred losing myself in big, chunky novels. Perhaps it's a change that's come with age, or maybe it's just a temporary literary itch I hadn't realized needed to be scratched. Either way, in honor of Short Story Month, Kate Vane and I present our favorites. Prepare for those TBR piles to start expanding...




What Kate's Into:

Blood by Janice Galloway

“Visceral” is a word I try to avoid overusing in reviews but it perfectly describes Janice Galloway’s writing, never more so than in the title story of this collection. A schoolgirl’s apparently uneventful visit to the dentist is drenched in significance.

Galloway is always innovating – as well as writing fiction she has written opera libretti and has collaborated with visual artists. This collection too shows her willingness to experiment with form as she dissects her subjects with a ruthless eye and dark humour.

The Unknown Errors of Our Lives by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

These are beautifully realised stories about women in India and America. Many are immigrants. More than that, though, these are stories about the “between” space where we all live – not just between cultures but between generations, between love and hate, between self and society.

Divakaruni’s beautiful imagery and understated style create an effect which is, like many of her characters, quietly powerful.

The Complete Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant

When I was about twelve, a teacher read us Maupassant’s “The Diamond Necklace” (also known as “The Necklace”) and I was absolutely stunned by the ending.

Maupassant was prolific and the quality of his stories varies but at his best he created vividly drawn portraits of nineteenth-century bourgeois France.

Endings tend to be less emphatic in contemporary stories but I like to get to the end of a story and feel that something in its world has changed. Maupassant gives you a world – and then turns it upside-down.

What Lori's Into:

Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth by Stephen Graham Jones

Jones is like a mad scientist, rolling up his sleeves to play elbow-deep with his creations before strangling them quietly to death and burying them deep in the ground where they'll dissolve into dry and brittle bones with our memories of them buried right there, alongside. 

The writing, people. The writing is phenomenal in this incredibly fucked up kind of way. Dude's got a great way of working out the bizarre to make it seem just normal enough... and oh my GAWD the opening story with the dad and his son. 

This Time While We're Awake by Heather Fowler

Heather Fowler has taken literature to places I hadn't known it could go. A practice baby for expecting parents, that looks and acts just like your own baby would (so creepy); drugged breeders who are awakened for one day of copulation and impregnation, then put back to sleep while the baby gestates (so freaky); a town that allows an alien species to harvest one of them per visit in return for their continued protection against the assumed horrors that exist on the other side of the walls that seal them off from the rest of the world (so scary).

A wickedly dark and haunting collection that shows its readers an alternative look at the future of humanity; a deep, devastating spiral into strange and frightening circumstances.

I Am by Ben Tanzer

Ben Tanzer takes on celebrity has-beens, almost-weres, and still-ares in this saucy collection of stories told from each individual perspective. Some stories connected with me immediately - Vanilla Ice, Richard Simmons, Corey Feldman, Darth Vadar - while others floated out in over-my-head land because I simply lacked the name recognition. That didn't lessen the impact of the collection, though. Tanzer brilliantly birthed each persona, forced their words up off the page, and made each one come alive much like a puppeteer brings life to his marionettes.

A quick, enticing collection, clocking in at just under 100 pages, that demonstrates a brand new side of Ben.

What are some of your favorite short story collections? 

Bronwyn Reviews: I'll Be a Stranger to You

I'll Be a Stranger to You

Pages: 315

Publisher: Outpost19

Release Date: 2011

Guest reviewed by Bronwyn Mauldin

You’ll never save the world if you can’t even save yourself. That’s the hard truth at the heart of Cara Diaconoff’s novel, I’ll Be a Stranger to You.

Each year, thousands of young American Peace Corps volunteers strike out for places like Lesotho, Kyrgyzstan and Bolivia, full of heady idealism about saving the world. After two years of trying to make their small corner of it a better place, they return home with a certain ambivalence about their experience. I got a lot out of it, I’ve heard them say, but I don’t know if I helped anyone else. “Teach a man to fish,” the saying goes, but they’re sent to places where people have been making their livelihoods from fish for millennia.

The Mormon missionaries of I’ll Be a Stranger to You stand in striking contrast to the returned Peace Corps volunteers I know. Diaconoff’s novel is set in Moscow in the 1990s, a few years after the Berlin Wall has fallen. The political, economic and social order of the former Soviet Union is unraveling, and these fresh-faced, young American Mormons are certain they have the answer to what the new Russia needs.

All except Lucas Tiller. Tall, thin and lopy, Lucas stayed on in Moscow after finishing his mission, launching a small tech business with financing from his wealthy father-in-law. That business is on the brink of failure, as is the country’s currency and economy. He has laid off most of his staff – all of them Russian – and is trying desperately to hold on to the few small contracts he still has. He hasn’t paid himself a salary in months. He is, by turns, trying to save his business, his marriage, and himself. Lucas, his hair in a ponytail, too long for a missionary, tells the head of the Mormon mission in Moscow, “Well, you’ve come to the right source, then… if you want humble. I gave up all my high ambitions months ago.”

It’s not just his failing business he’s thinking of. Lucas is also struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. He’s a closeted gay Mormon who thinks his secret is safe. His wife, Marianne, has returned to the U.S. for an extended visit. They’ve told each other it’s temporary, it’s because Moscow is too foreign for her. He knows she wants to go back permanently. What we will learn is that’s only part of what she wants.

Walking through the metro on his way to work one morning with a copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People under his arm, Lucas passes a “samovar,” a quadriplegic veteran propped up on a skateboard. “Back home, if you saw such people, they at least rode in wheelchairs, or maybe even had artificial limbs – the point was they had things around them, a whole cushioned apparatus, so that you could more readily accept that behind their eyes still resided a brain and a soul that functioned just like yours did.” Lucas tries to strike up a casual conversation with the man, who responds by asking for cigarettes. He briefly imagines sitting in the park with the samovar, talking and laughing under a tree filled with twittering birds. Lucas imagines lighting a cigarette for him, putting it in his mouth for him to smoke. Though the brief scene can be read with sexual subtext, it is Lucas’s sense of loss and loneliness that shine through.

Diaconoff’s novel offers a peek behind the scenes of the missionary experience. Thousands of young Mormons go through intensive language training (Lucas turns out to be particularly adept) and are sent each year to proselytize around the world in their white shirts, black pants and ties. Lucas and the other young missionaries refer to each other as “Elder” or “Sister.” When the challenges they face threaten to overwhelm them, they get on their knees together and pray. Their earnestness matches the Peace Corps volunteers’ belief in their own power to save the world.

The story is told primarily from Lucas’s point of view, though occasionally we get brief glimpses of what other characters are thinking. A significant section is devoted to his wife Marianne’s perspective back in the U.S. It runs long, giving more back story than is perhaps needed, but it pays off when Lucas fails multiple times to get a crucial piece of news. Lesson: always check your phone messages, even when you’re expecting bad news. It could be worse than you expected.

A number of scenes take place in seedy Moscow nightclubs. Lucas’s attempt to end his friendship with an older openly gay Englishman named Clyde begins at one and ends with the two of them in jail, Lucas dressed in a woman’s silk pajamas and pancake makeup. His effort to save his business takes him into a different nightclub where he meets with the Russian mafia. This, too, does not end well.

At the center of I’ll Be a Stranger to You is a collection of people seeking to save what cannot be salvaged. Marianne returns to Moscow and attempts to save her marriage, even as Lucas falls in love with Adam Held, another Mormon missionary. Lucas tries to save his business in the midst of a collapsing economy. Adam tries to save a young army deserter because he is in love with the soldier’s prostitute sister. Lucas tries to save himself from his own sexuality. Nearly all of them will fail. The memory of their struggle will stay with you.   

Bronwyn Mauldin is the author of the novel Love Songs of the Revolution. She won The Coffin Factory magazine’s 2012 very short story award, and her Mauldin’s work has appeared in the Akashic Books web series, Mondays Are Murder, and at Necessary Fiction, CellStories, The Battered Suitcase, Blithe House Quarterly, Clamor magazine and From ACT-UP to the WTO. She is a researcher with the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and she is creator of GuerrillaReads, the online video literary magazine.

Page 69: Nativity of a Devil

The Page 69 Test is not mine. It has been around since 2007, asking authors to compare page 69 against the meat of the actual story it is a part of. I loved the whole idea of it and so I'm stealing it specifically to showcase small press titles - novels, novellas, short story collections, the works! So until the founder of The Page 69 Test calls a cease and desist, let's do this thing....

In this installment of Page 69, 

we put C.V. Ruisdael's Nativity of a Devil to the test.

Ok, CV, set up page 69 for us.

On Page 69 of Nativity of a Devil, a demon named Botis is luring the protagonist, Virgil, back in time to Constantinople to show him one of the seven deadly sins. In this scene, Botis is showing the boy the sin of gluttony, which is personified by the Glutton on this page. As history tells us, before the Empress Theodora actually became an empress, she had been a courtesan and burlesque dancer and, in this scene, the Glutton is trying his best to buy her for the night.

Botis and Virgil are watching the transaction from afar. (The currency that they mention, ‘silvata’ and ‘solidus’ are the equivalent of silver and gold.)

What is Nativity of a Devil about?

Nativity of a Devil is a semi-comical story about predestination and repentance: A boy named Virgil is constantly ridiculed at school because he has two strange nubs growing out of his forehead. The boys at school constantly call him a “Devil” and laugh at him. One day, Virgil lashes out on his classmates at school and gets suspended for seven days. And when his father learns about the boy’s suspension, he calls him a “Devil” as well in a bout of anger.

Since the whole world is calling him a “Devil,” Virgil actually starts to believe it and even thinks that he destined to be in Hell. Once the boy wishes to be in Hell, a demon named Botis emerges from the depths and carries him down into Hell. He tells the boy that he is indeed “predestined to become a demon,” and tries to show him how to be a demon by displaying all of the seven deadly sins in seven different historical periods. The demon shows the boy the Pride of Robespierre during the French Revolution, the Lust of an Archbishop during the time of the Black Plague and the Envy of a Roman statesman during the time of the Roman Empire.

After seeing all of the sins, however, Virgil wishes to return back to London and to beg forgiveness of his father. But the demon insists that the boy is predestined and must remain in Hell for all time to come.

Do you think this page gives our readers an accurate sense of what Nativity of a Devil is about? Does it align itself the book’s overall theme?

Although this particular page doesn’t align with the overall theme, it is a fine example of the adventure and humor that occurs in each of the seven chapters showing a deadly sin. All of the “sin chapters,” as I call them, are all different, however, are just little stories within a story—a frame narrative of sorts.

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PAGE 69 

NATIVITY OF A DEVIL

Returning to Virgil, the demon rested his chin on the boy’s shoulder and said, “Let’s see what happens here…”

     As the Glutton’s back-sweat glistened in the candlelight of the theatre, the demon looked on, pondering. “I wonder what she will she charge him? One thousand silvata? Three thousand? Four? She is, after all, the most coveted courtesan in all of Constantinople—so much so that even the Emperor Justinian will someday come and marry her.”

     “Eight?!” the Glutton shouted, almost tripping over one of the chairs. Slowly, he regained his balance. “—Eight thousand solidus?” he murmured, as the flabbiness of his chin wriggled and shook.

     “Eight thousand. And if you cannot afford that, sir,” Theodora answered, pointing at Botis, “then I shall ask the gentleman in the cowl what he is paying.” 

     “Ten thousand silvata!” Botis whispered in Virgil’s ear, laughing. 

     Flustered, the Glutton turned around, looked at his servants and reluctantly nodded. “Eight thousand it is,” he told them. “Go and get it.”

     “Silvata?” the servant asked, seeming a bit confused.

      “Solidus,” the Glutton answered.

     Casting all of his regret aside, the Glutton looked back at Theodora adoringly and smiled. “Come, now. Let us eat,” he said. “Come,” he repeated, wrapping his thick, greasy fingers around her small, delicate wrist.

     Theodora slapped his hand away proudly. “I do not

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C.V. Ruisdael currently lives in Philadelphia, PA, but has lived in a number of cities in France, the Netherlands and Belgium. Nativity of a Devil is his first novella, but he has since prepared a number of short stories and, also, a full-length novel, which is set for publication at the end of 2015.

Lavinia Reviews: The New York Stories

The New York Stories by Ben Tanzer
4.5 Stars - Strongly Recommended by Lavinia
Pages 224
Publisher: CCLaP
Releasing: June 2015

Guest Reviewed by Lavinia Ludlow

Nine years in the making, one could say that The New York Stories is Ben Tanzer’s greatest hits collection. Hardly just a mash-up of his most provoking work, this three-volume-in-one deal is the real deal.

The thing about Tanzer is that his writing is never irresponsibly fast-paced and disorienting. Instead, he uses the space as if it’s the last he will ever have—no piece is ever more than a couple thousand words, and there’s not a single moment that wanes or bores. Each story packs a straightforward and honest anecdote with situations most can identify with—growing pains, lessons learned through trauma, family issues, falling in and out of love.

Tanzer shows us how much it can suck sometimes growing up and living in Smalltown, USA, where everyone’s privilege to everyone else’s soap opera-like drama, no one is without some dark secret(s), and if they’re not directly involved in a broken family, they’re at the sidelines witnessing the harsh realities of what abuse, cheating, cutting, and divorce does to a person. On a more granular level, stories delve into a hot-for-teacher fantasy turned reality, a neighborhood sleazebag fucking everyone’s wife, teen pregnancy, cutting, and snotty teenagers torturing the less apt. Think the childhood innocence and beauty of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood crossed with the bizarre quirks of a Scott McClanahan collection, inclusive of those reoccurring crazy assholes who drive the whole town crazy.

These tales are common and can occur in any neighborhood or household at any given time. Their conflicts aren’t mind-blowing or have fanatical twists, but the simplicity and straight-forward narratives make them that much more poignant. Everyone can identify with crappy childhoods, bullies, prepubescent moments, familial rifts, relationship tensions, personal uncertainties, and the occasional existential tailspin. Tanzer gives us a front row seat in a theater streaming the everyday person’s hurt, frustration, tension, isolation, and despair as they stumble through the trials of life. We listen with empathy and heavy hearts as they admit in their most vulnerable states of mind what most won’t dare say aloud:

“I look at her. I miss her. I really do, the intimacy, her touch, being in love, all of it… I turn around to look at her, hug her, kiss her, have her tell me it’s going to be all right, but she’s gone, the house empty, devoid of life and love and anything that used to look like it.”

And separately:

“I used to wait for my dad to visit. I’d sit there by the window late at night, searching for him like a cop’s wife must do. Every shadow might be him, I thought; but no, it never was.”

The collection isn’t completely devoid of humor, and every so often, a laugh-out-loud moment breaks apart grey:

“What kind of man lets someone park in his lot without making a purchase?” Robby always says. “I’ll tell you, the same kind of man who watches another man fuck his wife.

Tanzer presents an intimate glimpse into the lives of writers, runners, sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers who can’t help but be oh-so-human at times. We have the privilege of seeing them at their most honest and vulnerable, and this summer, as you sit by the pool or lake with a cocktail/mocktail/light beer in one hand, make sure your other is clutching a copy of The New York Stories.

Check out my review of the second volume, sandwiched in The New York Stories, over at Marc Schuster’s Small Press Reviews: https://smallpressreviews.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/so-different-now/

Lavinia Ludlow is a musician, writer, and occasional contortionist. Her debut novel alt.punk can be purchased through major online retailers as well as Casperian Books’ website. Her sophomore novel Single Stroke Seven was signed to Casperian Books and will release in the distant future. In her free time, she is a reviewer at Small Press Reviews, The Nervous Breakdown, American Book Review, and now The Next Best Book Blog. 

Audio Giveaway - Love and Death with the In Crowd and Mating Calls

Jessica Anya Blau's super short collection of short stories - Love and Death with the In Crowd and Mating Calls - have recently been recorded as an audio book and she's given us a free download code (one for each collection) for two lucky winners. 


What Love and Death with the In Crowd is about:

We think of the past as a more innocent time. But in these stories of California teenagers acting out in the last years of the ’70s, it’s easy to see that love, loss, and heartbreak are even more poignant when viewed through 15- or 16-year-old eyes. Surrounded by friends and family who are spinning with their own losses and heartache, these teenage girls navigate the terrors and tenderness of life in the only ways they know how. In this touching and moving pair of coming-of-age stories, best-selling author Jessica Anya Blau makes it clear that once you step over certain lines, there’s no going back. 



Sample it here:

http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Love-and-Death-with-the-In-Crowd-Audiobook/B00WYACVKQ?source_code=AUDORWS0504159DI3&amp

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What Mating Calls is about:

Could a little yellow pill be responsible for landing Lexie James in the bed of her lover - and her lover's wife? Whatever the reason for this charmingly reckless school counselor's bad behavior, you've never been on a bender like this one. 


Sample it here:

http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Mating-Calls-Audiobook/B00X6GLY1E/ref=a_pd_Fictio_c8_1_sim_auth

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How to win them:

Simply leave a comment here stating which collection you'd like to win, and leave a way to contact you. That's it. It's super-easy. This one comes with no commitment! 

We'll name the winners a week from today (Wednesday the 27th)

Good luck you guys!

Michalle Gould Recommends Andorra

And so we continue our Writers Recommend - a newish series where we ask writers to, well, you know.. recommend things. Like the books that they've enjoyed. To you. Because who doesn't like being recommended new and interesting books, right?! Think of it as a PSA. Only it's more like an LSA -Literary Service Announcement.

Michalle Gould Recommends Andorra

When I was in my first year of MFA school, one of the concepts the instructor for our first-year seminar introduced us to was that of the “paradigm shift.”  This was in 1998, but as I remember it, the definition of a paradigm shift in the context of literature was that it involved a moment in a book that changed your understanding of everything else that went before it but that was also “in retrospect, inevitable.”  

For me, Peter Cameron’s novel Andorra is the perfect embodiment of a book that causes the reader to experience a paradigm shift.  It presents us with a character, Alexander Fox, who is motivated by a personal tragedy to leave America and begin his life anew in the small country of Andorra.  Most readers will probably know little about the actual country, the sixth-smallest in Europe, located in the mountains between Spain and France.  Nonetheless, it seems clear from early on in the novel that there is something a bit off about the narrator’s life there and that it is doubtful that the Andorra of the novel bears much resemblance to the real one.  

The novel is unusual in combining an almost magical realist sort of setting with a very minimalist although elegant prose style.  Although quite a few readers appear to find the narrator unsympathetic or emotionally distant, that was not my own experience in reading - he caused me to think by contrast of the TS Eliot quote that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”  The more the narrator tried to suppress his feelings through the neutral tone he uses to describe the people and situations he encounters in Andorra, the more I sensed the intensity of the regret and longing that was buried beneath the surface, for good or ill.

The novel turns in an unexpected direction as our main character becomes a suspect in a murder investigation and the new life that he has tried so hard to create quickly begins to fray at the edges.  One of the epigraphs for a section of the novel is “small countries make delightful prisons” (James Merrill) and the setting that seemed so idyllic and full of light at the beginning of the novel begins to appear more like a trap.  We fear that he will have to escape from this place that he has gone to precisely to escape from his former life.  And then there is that moment above, the one that changes everything.  To find out how, you will have to read for yourselves.  

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Bio:  Michalle Gould's first full-length collection of poetry, Resurrection Party, was recently published by Silver Birch Press.  Her poems and short stories have appeared in Slate, New England Review, Poetry, American Literary Review, The Texas Observer, and other journals. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she works as a librarian, and is in the process of researching and writing a novel set in the North of England during the 1930s.

Page 69: Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales

The Page 69 Test is not mine. It has been around since 2007, asking authors to compare page 69 against the meat of the actual story it is a part of. I loved the whole idea of it and so I'm stealing it specifically to showcase small press titles - novels, novellas, short story collections, the works! So until the founder of The Page 69 Test calls a cease and desist, let's do this thing....

In this installment of Page 69, 

we put Tom Williams' Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales to the test. 

OK, Tom, set up page 69 for us.

This worked out perfectly, as 69 (tee-hee) is the first page of the story “The Finest Writers in the World Today,” the fifth story in a collection of ten.

What is Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales about?

Any more, I feel I’m the last person to have the right answer to such a good question as this, because oftentimes when I’m asked such a question I have a really mundane answer, while the person asking has a far better response because they’ve brought to my words whatever they’ve experienced. Despite my poor track record, I’ll sally forth and say this: that ultimately the ten stories are all about the state of being in-between. In most cases it’s a character who is biracial—neither black, nor white but both—but it’s also characters who yearn to belong. To me this state has always been of such great potential and such great sorrow. I think it also speaks to a larger human condition: being a spiritual mulatto, in that one might have allegiances to different groups and yet never feels fully connected, never feels as though one really has found her proper “place”—whether that’s among peers, a certain region or locality, or mental space. We’re all, at least I believe, all sorts of in-between. Yeah, that’s what the book’s about.

Do you think this page gives our readers an accurate sense of what Among the Wild Mulattos is about? Does it align itself the book’s overall theme?

This is one of the “workplace” stories in the collection, and while there isn’t a specifically racial concern on this page (and throughout the story), it does orbit around the idea of identity, celebrity, and art—three issues I seem to never be able to shed in my fiction. And while I hope it operates as a story that supplies some good laughs in a book that toggles between high and low comedy, high and low art, it also asks some pretty serious questions about the relationship between (there’s that word again) art and commerce, writers and their work, writers and their audience. Funny stuff, right? And it’s told in first person plural, which everybody loves.

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PAGE 69

AMONG THE WILD MULATTOS AND OTHER TALES

The Finest Writers in the World Today

To tell the truth, at first none of us believed there was money to be made from Tina Prescott’s idea. Cause Celebs had been around for two-and-a-half years and was doing well enough to have five agents and about a hundred lookalikes because we understood our audience. They were people who wanted to bring pizzazz to the events in their lives, but on the cheap. For a nine-year- old’s birthday, they couldn’t afford the real article, so what about someone who resembled Brad Pitt? That was a different story. And though Cause Celebs wasn’t the only agency in town, our lookalikes were dead ringers, as well as excellent vocalists and dancers. Or they wore great costumes and could lip synch.

Our performers broke down to two categories then. Dead celebrities was one: Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, old and young Elvises and Sinatras—the perfect addition for your grandparents’ anniversary! We also had contemporaries, which at the time meant Britney Spears, P-Diddy, Madonna, Bill and Hilary, both President Bushes. And they were all good, dead or contemporary. They made a nice flat fee, five hundred for three hours, out of which we took our thirty percent. No one was

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Tom Williams is the author of the novella The Mimic’s Own Voice (Main Street Rag Publishing) and the novel Don’t Start Me Talkin’ (Curbside Splendor). His newest, a collection of stories called Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales, will appear in July of 2015 from Texas Review Press. The Chair of English at Morehead State University, he lives in Kentucky with his wife and children.