A food truck craze involving human cannibalism. A Texas Governor who obsessively listens to Rebecca Black right before every state execution. A chainsaw factory that plays Ozzy Osbourne for its welding robots. An ex-girlfriend drunk-dialing from Kandahar, where she's starting a Shakey's Pizza restaurant chain. And an endless search to find the right mix of prescription medication to stop the memories of a bizarre past. These mad stories make up the latest by Jon Konrath, a collection of 20 flash fiction narratives that cross between metafiction and experimental prose, telling grim and absurd fast-paced tales about Konrath's life in a twisted fashion.
I write absurdist, bizarro, and experimental fiction, and self-publish because the big six (or five or four or whatever it is this week) tend to shy away from fiction about plane crash enthusiasts and Satanic demolition derby leagues.
I've published eight books, including Rumored to Exist, Fistful of Pizza, The Earworm Inception, and Sleep Has No Master. I also run Paragraphline.com, which has published 13 issues of fiction and occasional fact. And I've appeared in a bunch of anthologies and on websites and in zines. I got started in the zine world by writing reviews of heavy metal albums, and I occasionally lapse back into that when I don't take my medication.
I've lived in North Dakota, Michigan, Indiana, Seattle, New York, Denver, Los Angeles, and now Oakland. When I am not writing or creating an environment to foster dust mite reproduction in the form of collecting books, I take things apart, try to play bass, and spend too much time on wikipedia reading about obsolete technology and farming methods of the 14th century.
I can be found at http://rumored.com or on twitter at @jkonrath.
