Description
Like a cracked crystal ball tagged with black spray paint, these discomforting and darkly hilarious stories unveil a past, present, and future of unexplainable yet bizarrely poetic prophesies and moods. In ninety-five flash fictions, Shane Kowalski’s Small Moods presents lovers, dogs, bathtubs, hands, jewels, bananas, peasant boys, cuckolds, Jesus, dildoes, shoes, nudes, cults, sadness, the movie Carrie, and much much more. Can you imagine a love child of Lydia Davis and Richard Brautigan? How about Russell Edson’s ghost having tea with Diane Williams? Reading Small Moods is like entering a weird and private room of reject fairy tales and goofball fables. It’s a room that belongs to Shane Kowalski, and he is welcoming you with strong, open, sweat-drenched arms. Don’t be afraid. He made you something.
I am in love with this weird, gross, hilarious, beautiful book, and with Shane Kowalski’s cursed sentences, which enchant you, seduce you, then drop you off in hell. Every story is a perfect little snow globe of sidesplitting misery.
— J. Robert Lennon, author of Pieces for the Left Hand and Let Me Think
“I loved Small Moods. Shane Kowalski’s short prose pieces are surreal, bleak, sly, and utterly original.”
—Amy Fusselman, author of Idiophone
“These runically truthful miniatures—some just outbursts of a few staggered sentences, others in the form of anecdotes and parables, still others reading like entire novels scaled down to just a clutch of hectic paragraphs—are by turns sweet-hearted and ruthless, loopy and doleful, otherworldly and ribald, but always inventively off-kilter and entirely on the mark in their raucous sweeps of human ache and ecstasy. In the hands of Shane Kowalski, Small Moods is in fact a very big deal.”
—Garielle Lutz, author of Worsted
Shane Kowalski lives outside of Philadelphia. He has an MFA in fiction from Cornell University. He works for the United States Postal Service. His work appears in Puerto del Sol, Electric Literature, The Offing, Hobart, and elsewhere. He’s the author of the chapbooks, Dog Understander (Frontier Slumber Press) and How I Solve How I Feel (Ghost City Press).
ISBN 978-1-892061-90-4
154 pages
4.25 x 7 inches
$13 cover price
Cover design by Michael Seidlinger, collage by Kevin Sampsell
Available through Ingram, Small Press Distribution, and Antiquated Future
Publication date: February 10th, 2022
