by Corey MeslerCover art by Debra Jackson-Jones |
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To be held in cupped hands and passed around with wonder, the storied worlds of I’ll Give You Something to Cry About constitute a grouping born of spellbinding cosmic dust. Once more assuming the mantle of Story's guardian, Corey Mesler sets to work at not only protecting and preserving, but pondering, playing, prodding, and perambulating within the bounds of narrative creation and exhaustion. Whether in the form of wife- and life-stealing bear, manuscript-eating desk, disillusioned newlywed couple, title-swapping library collection, or man bent on redefining his neurotic existence, these tales—fabled, monstrous, Southern, intimate, meta, everyday, other, biblical, and minor—effect a coalescence of teller and listener that is nothing short of celestial. |
"This is what a collection of stories should be, rich and varied, playful, daring, poignant and always entertaining. Corey Mesler's children and adults move about American locales both familiar and exotic and the result is an experience as broad and interesting as life itself."
—ROBERT LOPEZ, author of Kamby Bolongo Mean River and Asunder
"Corey Mesler's story collection I'll Give You Something to Cry About is a quiver full of picaresque and heartbreak. Half his Lazarillos are agoraphobes but they all get around, these bankers and bums and biologists. Mesler maps Memphis (-and-environs, -and-beyond) with myth and metaphor, sends ghost after ghost to haunt the streets, Elvis and Lennon, Pandora and Penelope, and they're all stretching for the same top-branch chestnuts that sustain the rest of us: peace and love, yes, oh peace and love."
—ROY KESEY, author of Pacazo and All Over
"‘He could think of nothing that he could do to work out the chthonic powers of the thing, to twig to its abracadabra.’ So writes Corey Mesler of one of his many wondrously perplexed protagonists in the author's new collection I’ll Give You Something to Cry About, though honestly, Mesler might be describing one of his own readers. Pursuing these stories is like entering an art gallery filled with the paintings of René Magritte—as with every successive viewing the lines between art and trickery, irony and pathos, magic and prestidigitation grow ever finer."
—BRAD VICE, author of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train
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$14.95 |
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