Short Circuits / Bad News from the Stars - Two Books in One (Ocean View Doubles) [Paperback]

Bruce Boston (Author), Steve Sneyd (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0938075152 | ISBN-13: 978-0938075158 | Publication Date: January 1, 1991 | Edition: 1

Twenty-two prose poems by the leading contemporary American genre poet published back-to-back with seventeen poems by the leading contemporary English genre poet.

Editorial Reviews

Review

At Madame Tarot's
Baptismal
The Biker
The Cocksman Speaks
Gumming It
His Winter Years
Horrors Of The Anti-world
In The Eyes Of Old Dogs
In The Metempsychosis Of Bone I Flee
Interregnum
Looking For The Other Side
Musing
A Night With The Boys
One Way Street
Reflections Of A Former Self
Romanticism Has Forgotten How To Fly
Separate Vacations
The Separation
The Short Hello
Sustenance
We Build A Better Pet
When The Wordmonger Screams
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 83 pages
• Publisher: Ocean View Books; 1 edition (January 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0938075152
• ISBN-13: 978-0938075158
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,337,820 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Three-time Bram Stoker Award winner Bruce Boston is the author of forty-five books and chapbooks, including the novels The Guardener's Tale and Stained Glass Rain. His fiction and poetry have appeared in hundreds of publications, most visibly in Asimov's SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Nebula Awards Showcase. In addition to the Bram Stoker Award, Boston has received a Pushcart Prize, the Asimov's Readers Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. He lives in Ocala, Florida, with his wife, writer-artist Marge Simon. For more information, you can visit his website at http://www.bruceboston.com/.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars On Bruce Boston's "Short Circuits", June 22, 2011

By 

Kristine Ong Muslim - See all my reviews

This review is from: Short Circuits (Paperback)

Bruce Boston is the first writer whose range of style and knowledge embodies what I imagine to be the finest speculative fiction, and his Short Circuits is an important primer on the art of flash fiction.

It starts off with the poignant "In the Eyes of Old Dogs." From the perspective of pet dogs, the story startlingly gives insight on the human condition.

"Reflections of a Former Self" is an issue on the nature of reality. It begins with the unapologetic statement: "He noticed that in the presence of mirrors her vanity surfaced."

There's the quirky story about the "precise" character named Finch, who takes precision to absurd levels.

A memorable story, "The Separation," is an erudite take on materialism. An excerpt:

"Objects," his burnished wife told him, "the world is composed merely of objects. Yet one must choose the proper objects... "


The grisly "Separate Vacations" tells how a husband receives his wife's body parts in the mail, and yes, they are mailed one part at a time.

The satirical "The Cocksman Speaks" is a delight, like an exotic-fruit-flavored ice cream.

"Interregnum" is deliciously blasphemous.

The last story, "Musing," is a fairy tale on hallucinogens: "Her thighs slide up my body, down, gold hairs sparking, and I know that she's not in the circus for nothing..."

(Loved this book. Bought from Fictionwise during a lunch break, 2010.)