Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons: Stories

by Keith Rosson

Overview

With Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, award-winning author Keith Rosson once again delves into notions of family, identity, indebtedness, loss, and hope, with the surefooted merging of literary fiction and magical realism he's explored in previous novels. In "Dunsmuir," a newly sober husband buys a hearse to help his wife spread her sister's ashes, while "The Lesser Horsemen" illustrates what happens when God instructs the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to go on a team-building cruise as a way of boosting their frayed morale. In "Brad Benske and the Hand of Light," an estranged husband seeks his wife's whereabouts through a fortuneteller after she absconds with a cult, and the returning soldier in "Homecoming" navigates the strange and ghostly confines of his hometown, as well as the boundaries of his own grief. With grace, imagination, and a brazen gallows humor, Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons merges the fantastic and the everyday, and includes new work as well as award-winning favorites.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946154545
Publisher:	Meerkat Press
Publication date:	02/23/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	206
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Keith Rosson is the award-winning author of the novels The Mercy of the Tide and Smoke City.  Keith Rosson is the award-winning author of the novels The Mercy of the Tide and Smoke City. His short fiction has appeared in Cream City Review, PANK, Outlook Springs, Black Static, Phantom Drift, December, and more. He lives in Portland, Oregon. More info can be found at keithrosson.com.

Table of Contents

The Lesser Horsemen 1

At This Table 17

Baby Jill 25

Their Souls Climb the Room 32

Hospitality 44

This World or the Next 58

Gifts 70

Coyote 84

Yes, We are Duly Concerned with Calamitous Events 94

Winter, Spring, Whatever Happens After That 110

Forgive Me This 125

Dunsmuir 131

Homecoming 148

The Melody of the Thing 159

Brad Benske and the Hand of Light 176

Acknowledgments 191

About the Author 193

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/30/2020

With this excellent collection of 15 jagged, fragmented pieces, dark fantasist Rosson (The Mercy of the Tide) subverts expectations and challenges his characters and his readers alike to second-guess their preconceptions. Evil is just as likely to spring from daily life as to lunge out of the supernatural in these disquieting tales. “Gifts,” a lacerating story of urban insurrection, feels firmly rooted in reality, except that some combatants are described in passing as “magicians.” The premises often look like very dark Monty Python sketches. What happens, for example, in “Baby Jill,” when the Tooth Fairy stops merely collecting teeth and begins worrying about the welfare of the children she visits? And, in “Yes, We Are Duly Concerned with Calamitous Events,” how quickly will social norms devolve among a group of office workers who become trapped in their building for weeks? No one is safe, not even the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who appear in “The Lesser Horsemen” as God decides to modernize. These powerful stories will leave readers unsettled in the best ways. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"There's a fierceness to Rosson's intellect, a wildness to his imagination, a crackling energy in his prose. The stories in Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons are often strange and sometimes funny and always irresistible. Like a brakeless train tearing through the tunnel of my mind, the propulsion and potency of this collection woke me up in the way only the best literature can." —Alan Heathcock, author of Volt and 40

From the Publisher