Magnificent Mistakes
by Eric Bosse

Description

The world we think we know shifts and turns otherworldly in the short stories and flash fictions that make up Eric Bosse’s Magnificent Mistakes. In smooth, subtle prose, Bosse moves through the lives of a menagerie of misfits, crackpots, and odd ones out. A bookstore clerk can’t shake the feeling of being watched. A son uses a camcorder to cajole his mother into assessing his life. A kinky, submissive inventor struggles to let go when his girlfriend dumps him. A widow pleads for a rabbi’s advice as her houseplants grow wild. A Zen master takes drastic measures to teach a young monk about impermanence. And a guy with a cold befriends a duck. Lit through from start to finish with an oblique sense of the darker side of life, this imaginative collection of stories evokes tenderness even as it refuses to forgive.

Comments:

“Eric Bosse has somehow learned all our secrets, and now he’s put them on display in Magnificent Mistakes. With this cheerfully mordant collection, he takes it all on—God, patricide, deviant sex, jugglers with nothing left to live for—and doesn’t flinch once throughout. Not satisfied with being merely funny or incisive, though, Bosse also manages to conjure and illuminate a basic, abiding humanity, even as he catalogues his characters’ many failings, regrets, and peccadilloes.” (Ron Currie Jr., author of God is Dead and Everything Matters!)

“Readers will find these nineteen stories beautifully strange and evocative. Inhabited by oddballs, lovers, ghosts, and runaways, the world Bosse creates is full of the unexpected, of chance encounters, and the vast and moving struggles of misfiring hearts. A stunning collection.” (Kathy Fish, author of Together We Can Bury It and Wild Life)

Excerpt:

from “The Dog-Faced Boy”

Two decades before he revolutionized the villanelle and transfigured the face of poetry, Gustave Bertaigne gained a reputation as the ugliest child in Philadelphia. His bulging eyes and grotesque proboscis only got uglier when his beard grew in so thick the neighborhood children nicknamed him “Rugface” and, later, “Wolfman,” “Fuzzleface,” and “The Hairy-Scary-Bloody-Mary-Huckleberry-Hound-Headed Boy.” The pubescent poet complained to his diary that his whiskers felt “prickly and taut, like the quills of an angry, dead porcupine.” When he shaved, the young Bertaigne’s beard left notches in his father’s straight razor. These notches sparked clashes between the boy and the man he knew as “Pére.”