Super Flat Times: Stories

by Matthew Derby

Overview

With a heightened sense of the boundless possibility and lurking doom that Orwell and Huxley once envisioned, Matthew Derby's stories provide a glimpse into an intricately imagined world: a world in which clouds are treated with behavioral serum, children are handicapped by their ability to float, and all food (including Popsicles) is made of meat.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316738576
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	05/05/2003
Edition description:	1ST
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

	First	3
	Years	5
	Fragment	13
	The Sound Gun	15
	Meat Tower	31
	The Boyish Mulatto	44
	Sky Harvest	56
	Home Recordings	61
	Year	51
	Fragment	73
	Joy of Eating	75
	The Father Helmet	80
	Crutches Used as Weapon	99
	Night Watchmen	114
	Behavior Pilot	123
	Years	52
	Fragment	137
	Stupid Animals	139
	The End of Men	142
	Instructions	155
	The Life Jacket	162
	Gantry's Last	172
	Fragment	191
	An Appeal	193

Editorial Reviews

"Derby's zanily inventive fictional world will disarm you with its bleak humor, its dire and giddy sentences, its irrepressible sense of wonder, its urgent narrative force. Prepare to laugh, to be uplifiled, to be a tiny bit ruined."

"Imagine The Matrix, but funny, or a neurotic Metropolis, and you might get some sense of what this weird, beautifully written book, made by someone who has watched far too much television, does to your brain."

"Matthew Derby's writing is a refreshing shock to the system. Read it and be entranced, enchanted, and transported. He is truly one of a kind."

From the Publisher

...a lofty achievement that combines unexpected humor and brilliant language.

Oregonian

...a hilarious, horrific, fascinating world...the resemblance to our own is as artful as it is unnerving.
—author of Make Believe and Tourmaline

Joanna Scott

Matthew Derby’s prose is Raymond Carver cadences crossed with the vision of a Philip K. Dick...Long live this literary American lynx.
—author of Let the Dog Drive and Bunny Modern

David Bowman

...a wagon circle around everything dull and earthbound in American fiction...shimmering with broken robots and strange machines...a vital and astonishing writer
—author of The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women

Ben Marcus

Matthew Derby's writing is a refreshing shock to the system. Read it and be entranced, enchanted, transported. He is truly one of a kind.
—author of If I Told You Once and Flying Leap

Judy Budnitz

Some of the concepts are breathtaking. So is much of the writing in this surreal mosaic made up of fragmented lives and broken hopes. — Kit Reed

The Washington Post

Fearlessly wild and weird debut brain fragments from the mind of Derby, creative futurologist. Derby's 20 dandies have appeared in such deliriously sophisticated journals as Failbetter, Fence, Pindeldyboz, 3rd Bed, and 5 Trope, not to mention Conjunctions and American Journal of Print, some of which are online literary pit stops wherein Derby has gathered emotionally hyperbolic fans by the dozens who delight in heavy-water stories and in sucking the creamsicle of death. Heavy-water stories sink to the bottom and allow lighter works to rise and shimmer. After all, these were the Super Flat Times-"years that did not seem to pass so much as inflate crazily almost to the bursting point, break, and collapse, withered and damp, only to be replaced by another weepy, indistinguishable abrasion. That we survived at all is a monument in itself, but we will soon pass, and the parks, too, will gradually lose their meaning, as each successive generation of children wears the concrete structures down to pillowy stumps with their play." Here are field-tested fragments from the store in the Hall of Memories describing the whole history of the Super Flat Times, collected especially for those who have been fortunate enough to have that whole history "swept from your head by the memory surgeons, so that all you remember is sitting up in the expansive Recovery Hall on Liberation Day with a bandage on your forehead and a sick taste in your mouth . . . " We're dragging the Sound Gun by hand. It has four settings: Make Scared. Hurt. Very Hurt. And Make Dead, which ruptures the enemy's bowels. After the Food Ban we eat only meat from the Meat Tower. Even apples, corn, chocolate are prepared from various curedmeats. The fortune cookie with my Chinese meal says only "Sorry." Artful social parody in a towering hypercontemporary mode, superbly scored for a chorus of wind-up cuckoos bleakly coming unwound. Agent: Matthew Miele/John Hawkins & Associates

Kirkus Reviews