The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down

Serious and witty, mystical and dark, these short stories by Meg Pokrass are small windows into another world, a world that is almost this onebut not quite. In her masterful pieces, Pokrass leads her readers on, page by page, enticing them with her beautiful and dream-like language. Bopping and slamming through these little stories like some genius world tour of the human heart, Pokrass gets a lot done in the shortest spaces imaginable. This collection of tiny, intimate truffles is as powerful as soul-chocolate infused with caffeine. Each of these 50 stories contains bite-sized glimpses into the lives of everyday people, leaving the reader with the long and lasting effects of a full-length novel. Each chapter delves into relevant life events that require further contemplation. Her language is supercharged and witty, with humor and sadness in approximately equal amounts, revealing the dark truth and reality of the world.

The people in these stories need Meg Pokrass. Their lives are tough but her imagination is the fire-lasso that can save them, save us. In her work, off-kilter is the same as clear-eyed focus. Here, strange and normal go hand-in-hand, a marriage that explains nothing but makes so much clear. Time after time, these little stories read big. Bob Hicok, author of Elegy Owed

With The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down, Flash Fiction comes of age. Bill Roorbach, author of The Remedy for Love and Life Among Giants

Supercharged and witty, with humor and sadness in approximately equal amounts Bobbie Ann Mason, author of Shiloh and Other Stories

These sexy but wistful prose poems hint at entire constellations of affections, relationships at once sweet, sad, satisfyingand not. Molly Peacock, author of The Second Blush

Pokrass writes books you want on your nightstand to read not once, but again and again. Nin Andrews, author of Why God Is A Woman

I dare you to read a Meg Pokrass sentence and not want to read the next. Just enter that voice voice and it makes magic. It’s the kind where you don’t know where you’re going until you’ve left, but you know it was deeply right to have been there. Unassuming, ridiculous, insightful, dark.Robert Shapard, editor of seven anthologies for W.W. Norton
including Sudden Fiction and Flash Fiction International

Meg Pokrass is a leading American writer of the flash fiction form. She is the author of four previous flash fiction collections: Bird Envy (Harvard Book Store, 2014); Damn Sure Right (Press 53, 2011); Cellulose Pajamas (Blue Light Press, 2015); and My Very End of the Universe, Five Mini-Novellas-in-Flash and a Study of the Form (Rose Metal Press, 2014). Her stories have appeared in more than 200 literary magazines, including McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Green Mountains Review, The Rumpus, storySouth and numerous anthologies, including Flash Fiction International (W. W. Norton, 2015).