About

Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found, forthcoming from Keyhole Press in October 2010, as well as three chapbooks, Wolf Parts (Keyhole Press), The Collectors (Caketrain Press), and How the Broken Lead the Blind (Willows Wept Press). His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Hayden's Ferry Review, Willow Springs, Unsaid, and American Short Fiction, and has been selected for inclusion in anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. His book reviews and critical essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, American Book Review, and The Quarterly Conversation.

He is also the editor of The Collagist and of Dzanc's Best of the Web anthology series.

He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his wife Jessica, and can be reached via e-mail at mdbell79@gmail.com.

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« Books Received: Andrew Porter's THE THEORY OF LIGHT AND MATTER | Main | Anne Valente's "Where There is Rain" »
Sunday
Oct122008

Barry Graham's NOT A SPECK OF LIGHT SHOWING

Barry Graham's new chapbook Not a Speck of Light Showing is now available by clicking here.  Barry's stories are alternately dark, heartfelt, and very, very funny.  And that's without even mentioning that more often than not, Barry brings a special kind of sexy to his prose, like the unclaimed, dirty underwear left behind after the best kind of parties.

Here's a sample story from the chapbook, titled "Blackhorse":

All the neighborhood kids waited for the school bus on a small cement slab at the bottom of the first big hill on Blackhorse Road. My mother made me scrambled egg sandwiches on wheat toast every morning for breakfast before I left for school. Then one morning she didn’t. One morning she was sleeping in the front yard with her shirt unbuttoned and her pants pulled down around her ankles. I didn’t know what to do about breakfast. I snuck into the corner store, beside the bus stop and stuffed a box of cream-filled doughnuts into my backpack. I waited to eat them until I got on the bus and sat down beside Amanda, the only retarded girl in our school. She always wore long blue jean skirts and white blouses and my older brother Eric said she had three titties instead of two and she’d let anybody touch them who said please. When I asked her if I could touch them she said no unless I shared my doughnuts with her every day from now until the end of the school year. I told her I’d give her two right now and that’s the best I could do because after tomorrow there’d be no more cream until the farmers made more milk, and that was good enough in retard logic. I handed her the doughnut and slid my hand up the front of her shirt. Creamy drool dripped from her mouth to her skirt.

Order your copy here, then check out the other release from the Achilles Chapbook Series, Drew Kalbach's The Zen of Chainsaws and Enormous Clippers.

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