HOBART

Roxane Gay shout-outs some books she’s looking forward to in 2012.

Short Flight/ Long Drive books has never put out a book that wasn’t excellent (Big World, Avian Gospels, etc.) so Fast Machine’s excellence is a sure thing. Ellen’s writing is amazing. I am a closet fan of everything she writes from essays to poetry to short fiction and it will be nice to have some of her writing, old and new, collected in one book. The best thing about Ellen’s writing is that it has big brass balls. There is seemingly nothing she won’t write about but more than the fearlessness is how Ellen writes about anything. She is willing to go there over and over and over but she does so really, really well. If you’re not familiar with Ellen’s work, start with “The Last American Woman,” and “bulldyke” and “What Was Meant.” You’ll see what I mean.

This has been making its way out into the world this week, and is now available for the Kindle, too!

I don’t know why they seemed to take so long to get there, but these are finally in stock at Amazon, if that’s your thing. Kindle version’s available, too.

Though if you order the physical book through the SF/LD website, we’ll send you the e-book for free…

The stories in Fast Machine come in three sizes: flash, regular, and too-long-for-journal-publication. Some were previously published. Some are brand-spanking new. The opening story ”State Liquor” concerns a twenty-five-year-old woman and her eighteen-year-old husband trying to buy alcohol on their way to their strip mall jobs, the afternoon of their wedding. In ”Fistful,” a pregnant teenager gets revenge on the young man who both impregnated and beat her, before leaving town with another man. In ”Habitrail,” a woman returns home after the death of her father, to find her husband in communication with the television set and a god he calls Chaos, rather than her. There are over ninety stories in this collection. Repeated themes include: driving, smoking, teenagers, drinking, escape, the Midwest, masturbation, self-loathing, blood and loneliness.