Product Description
Love, fantasy, hate, fantastic love and rage. Lady Gaga wrestles a dry cleaning attendant. An intelligent microbe with a sinister agenda falls for a human woman. A bored house maker has a wild sex with a novelist. A self-aware golem goes rogue.
By the author of My Life at First Try, reviewed by People magazine, Kirkus Review, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Bloomsbury Review and Ingram's Advance.
The editor of Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine in print.
Excerpt:
Lady Gaga's Dress
Lady Gaga carefully places a bag on the dry cleaner's counter as if it contains a garment made of Swarovski crystals. She wears a skin-tight dress of something inhumanly bright.
Her shades are the size of a VW Beetle's windshield.
"My personal assistant called in sick today," she says to the clerk. He eyes her with ill-conceived indifference.
"Be careful with this dress, boy," Lady Gaga says to the clerk who ceased to be a boy when Reagan and Gorbachev were presidents. "It's made of foreskins."
The clerk nods. His face is as blank as the first page of an unwritten story.
"Do you know who I am?" Lady Gaga asks.
"You are a lady customer," the clerk answers. His accent is vaguely Eastern European.
Lady Gaga takes off her shades. Her eyes are overflowing with something that could be mistaken for kindness only by a person suffering from prosopagnosia. "Are you shitting me?"
The clerk indicates with a shrug that shitting lady customers is above his pay grade.
Lady Gaga's face brightens up. "You're probably uncircumcised, boy?"
The clerk indicates with a shrug that the state of his penis' tip is not the lady customer's business.
"What is the nature of your stain?" he asks.
"On the dress made of foreskins? Blood, semen and vaginal discharge."
By the author of My Life at First Try, reviewed by People magazine, Kirkus Review, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Bloomsbury Review and Ingram's Advance.
The editor of Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine in print.
Excerpt:
Lady Gaga's Dress
Lady Gaga carefully places a bag on the dry cleaner's counter as if it contains a garment made of Swarovski crystals. She wears a skin-tight dress of something inhumanly bright.
Her shades are the size of a VW Beetle's windshield.
"My personal assistant called in sick today," she says to the clerk. He eyes her with ill-conceived indifference.
"Be careful with this dress, boy," Lady Gaga says to the clerk who ceased to be a boy when Reagan and Gorbachev were presidents. "It's made of foreskins."
The clerk nods. His face is as blank as the first page of an unwritten story.
"Do you know who I am?" Lady Gaga asks.
"You are a lady customer," the clerk answers. His accent is vaguely Eastern European.
Lady Gaga takes off her shades. Her eyes are overflowing with something that could be mistaken for kindness only by a person suffering from prosopagnosia. "Are you shitting me?"
The clerk indicates with a shrug that shitting lady customers is above his pay grade.
Lady Gaga's face brightens up. "You're probably uncircumcised, boy?"
The clerk indicates with a shrug that the state of his penis' tip is not the lady customer's business.
"What is the nature of your stain?" he asks.
"On the dress made of foreskins? Blood, semen and vaginal discharge."
About the Author
Mark Budman was born in the former Soviet Union and is fluent in Russian. His fiction, poetry and book reviews have appeared in such magazines as Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly, The London Magazine (UK), McSweeney's, American Book Review, The Bloosmbury Review, Sonora Review, Another Chicago, Sou'wester, Turnrow, Southeast Review, Mid-American Review, The Literary Review, the W.W. Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, Short Fiction(UK), The Warwick Review (UK), Flash (UK), Neo (Portugal) and elsewhere. He is the publisher of Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine in print. His novel My Life at First Try was published by Counterpoint Press to wide critical acclaim. He co-edited the anthologies You Have Time for This (Ooligan Press) and Sudden Flash Youth (Persea Books/WW Norton). He is at work at another anthology and two new novels. He judged several flash fiction contests.
markbudman.net
markbudman.net
