Single-Sentence Stories

How much dexterity does a writer need to write a “story” in a single sentence? In their virtuosic collection, brevity masters Harold Jaffe and Tom Whalen, drawing from a host of injustices currently at play on our teetering earth, meet this challenge with a variety of formal strategies: prose poems, micro-fictions, creation myths, pensées, headlines, fables, fragments, quotations, and graffiti. With its nuanced, often antiphonal structure, readers of Single-Sentence Stories will be engaged, entertained and informed by this unique collaboration.\nAs short prose grows more and more popular, practitioners have begun investigating sub-genres such as mini-prose, whose lineage goes back through Modernists like Scutenaire, Gómez de la Serna, and Félix Fénéon to the 18th Century aphorists. Here, two of our finest contemporary writers, longtime experimentalists, play ping pong with the form, scintillatingly.
M. Kasper\nIn Single-Sentence Stories, Jaffe and Whalen investigate the mysteries, pathos, joys and comedy of human experience while at the same time offering us a celebration of the primacy, flexibility and power of that singular, wondrous creation: the sentence.
R. Sebastian Bennett\nWhat Jaffe and Whalen have created is the perfect melding of form and meaning; they examine, in one-sentence stories, those who have themselves been sentenced, sentenced, that is, to marginalization, suppression, oppression, violence, and death, those who have been without and who have or have almost withstood, and Jaffe and Whalen do so in perfect succinctness as unrelenting agents for the awareness and action that are needed to bring radical improvement to this world we have all been sentenced to.
Ekhard Gerdes