Product Description Received Honorable Mention on the 2018 Writer's Bone Year's Best Books ListA Pontiac Sunfire experiences Springsteen-esque glory days; women captivate with unusual beauty; a murderous sloth threatens a child. With plots that dive immediately into the absurd, Crerand captures the angst of existential crises, the search for meaning, and moments of depth and beauty through humor and attention to detail. This seven-story collection is funny, serious, and bizarre. Review “Crerand is some rare kind of genius, offering unexpected shots of delight in stories that are miles high in imagination and distinctly and wonderfully weird. A Pontiac car goes to school and beyond, an airplane flight zooms into outer space, and in one especially daring, loopy story, a giant 7-toed sloth inhabits an abandoned zoo. I've never read anything quite like this collection--wild, wooly, and absolutely dazzling.” ~ Caroline Leavitt, author of Cruel Beautiful World and New York Times Best Sellers Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow"The Paper Life They Lead is the rare book that is as hilarious as it is terrifying, as heartfelt as it is intellectual, as realistic as it is experimental. Patrick Crerand is a writer of enormous talent and depth of heart. I love these stories; everyone who reads them will too." ~ Wiley Cash, author of The Last Ballad “These are some truly fine stories. What I love about Patrick Crerand is what I love about George Saunders: the persuasive absurdity, the human language (there is not a single imperfect word here) and the serious, serious laughter. I haven't had so much fun reading a book, and so much glorious heartbreak, in years.” ~ Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish and Extraordinary Adventures“The Paper Life They Lead is some kind of wild mixture of Etgar Keret and Ray Bradbury. You're never totally sure what to believe, but you always know you're in good hands. Patrick Crerand renders strange people in a world that is recognizable but not quite, and he does so with humor, intelligence, and a little bit of an edge. These stories are daring and jump off the page.” ~ Tom McAllister, author of How to Be Safe"Crerand's choices become the real art here, his ability to make them work so convincingly." ~ Michael Czyzniejewski, Story 366"In The Paper Life They Lead, Patrick Crerand takes risks in his storytelling, and the result is an inventive collection. In this slim book of just over 50 pages, Crerand’s mixture of flash fiction and slightly longer stories drops the reader into bizarre and unexpected places. Fantastical events occur even when the world looks much like the one we live in. The interesting and weird premises are stated upfront allowing the reader to focus on the characters—their relationships and how they react to the situations they are in." ~ Emily Webber, SmokeLong Quarterly About the Author Patrick Crerand's stories have appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, New Orleans Review, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review among others and have received special mention in The Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best American Fantasy anthologies. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University in Florida, where he lives with his wife and three kids.

The Paper Life They Lead: Stories

Literature & Fiction

Crerand, Patrick

Short Stories & Anthologies

Arc Pair Press

Rebbecca Brown's prose poetry collection renders birds, beasts, and surroundings from the lens of an artist who structures form with feeling. Acute observations are captured with music and tangled in emotion. Through the creation of portraits and landscapes, Brown fashions an exhibit of dynamic lyricism and word play. Speakers experience the biological as ephemeral, all the while bewildered by the promise of transformation. "This book is full of terribly glorious clamor." ~ Vanessa Baish, Entropy Magazine “I don’t know what to call these, and neither will you—protest poems or tiny prose laments? But as a speaker in one of them says, it’s not actions that are taboo, but the breaking of silences that surround them. And so, poet Rebbecca Brown sets out to smash them to pieces, all the dark unsaids rising up from soil and field, root and vine, barn and cell, blood and booze and loveless boys and girls to haunt our reading and contaminate our dreams. In equal measure, anguish and outrage, unsilenced, refuse to be anything but mouthy and here now in this strange and all-too familiar world where women give birth to bees, earth swells, and heat is heat. Downhome Americana has never sounded off as lyrical—or as brutal or tormented—as in the countless beating wings and throats of Brown’s ecstatic testaments to our sad humanity.” ~ Katharine Haake, author of Assumptions We Might Make About the Postworld and The Time of Quarantine “With its rich, evocative music, this book presents us with a decidedly democratic buffet completely devoid of snobbery, where no tasty word is too far off on the amuse-bouche spectrum to be excluded. To read this book is to feast!” ~ Shane Book, author of Congotronic and Ceiling of Sticks “Mouth Trap drops the reader into a world that is at once elemental and evocative. Steinbeck would feel right at home in these gorgeously dust-filled landscapes, replete with chicken claws and cabbages, at least until the center falls away and we meet ‘a lady who aged into a tumbleweed’ or a character who offers ‘fleeting moments and a sack of teeth.’ In this artful blend of the sensuous and surreal, Rebbecca Brown delights us with her word play before she duct tapes us back to the reality that ‘This is not a tome to grow old in.’ Perhaps not, but Mouth Trap is a collection to savor for a good, long while.” ~ Melody Mansfield, author of The Life Stone of Singing Bird and A Bug Collection "Brown has crafted dreamy, sometimes nightmarish, micro-worlds that challenge the confines of three dimensions. From the onset, she delivers an intentional, intelligently snarky heft which challenges the reader to engage in self-examination." ~ Seth Berg, South Broadway Ghost Society

Mouth Trap

Brown, Rebbecca

Literary

Six stories span a century of rural American women. Marriages occur in the 1930s for lack of other opportunities; a young girl dances to Thriller for her friend’s older brother; a pastor remembers her childhood spent fantasizing that she is the prophet John the Baptist. In the small towns of the Midwest, girls and women dream of finding voice and forcing the world to listen.

Wake in the Night

Krughoff, Laura

Six stories span a century of rural American women. Marriages occur in the 1930s for lack of other opportunities; a young girl dances to Thriller for her friend’s older brother; a pastor remembers her childhood spent fantasizing that she is the prophet John the Baptist. In the small towns of the Midwest, girls and women dream of finding voice and forcing the world to listen. “Spanning the last century with narrators aged 10 to 100, these stories reveal women struggling to fit a definition of womanhood that cannot contain them. By employing forms that break with convention in the same spirited ways her characters do, Laura Krughoff creates a world of stunning detail that examines just what people will do when expectations stifle truth. In Wake in the Night, we are reminded why we must push beyond easy categories and find new ways of understanding the roles we play.” ~ Paula Carter, author of No Relation “Laura Kroghoff’s stories have the lyrical exuberance of a Grace Paley in their bones.” ~ Christopher Grimes, author of The Pornographers and Public Works: Short Fiction and a Novella “In these beautifully written and disarmingly humane stories, Laura Krughoff points out the problems with our preconceived notions, and then imagines what new notions we might generate in their place so she can undermine those, too. Reading Krughoff is like having the nicest person in the world tell you there’s no Tooth Fairy, but that, even if there were, said creature wouldn’t act at all the way you’d think it would.” ~ Andrew Farkas, author of Sunsphere and Self-Titled Debut "Wake in the Night is flooded with life, and one gets the sense that Krughoff is a careful study of character and what forms a person’s identity. That curiosity and care with which Krughoff approaches her characters are deeply felt in her writing, making this an unforgettable collection." ~ Emily Webber, jmww

Essays & Correspondence

Rebbecca Brown's prose poetry collection renders birds, beasts, and surroundings from the lens of an artist who structures form with feeling. Acute observations are captured with music and tangled in emotion. Through the creation of portraits and landscapes, Brown fashions an exhibit of dynamic lyricism and word play. Speakers experience the biological as ephemeral, all the while bewildered by the promise of transformation. “I don’t know what to call these, and neither will you—protest poems or tiny prose laments? But as a speaker in one of them says, it’s not actions that are taboo, but the breaking of silences that surround them. And so, poet Rebbecca Brown sets out to smash them to pieces, all the dark unsaids rising up from soil and field, root and vine, barn and cell, blood and booze and loveless boys and girls to haunt our reading and contaminate our dreams. In equal measure, anguish and outrage, unsilenced, refuse to be anything but mouthy and here now in this strange and all-too familiar world where women give birth to bees, earth swells, and heat is heat. Downhome Americana has never sounded off as lyrical—or as brutal or tormented—as in the countless beating wings and throats of Brown’s ecstatic testaments to our sad humanity.” ~ Katharine Haake, author of Assumptions We Might Make About the Postworld and The Time of Quarantine "This book is full of terribly glorious clamor." ~ Vanessa Baish, Entropy Magazine "Brown has crafted dreamy, sometimes nightmarish, micro-worlds that challenge the confines of three dimensions. From the onset, she delivers an intentional, intelligently snarky heft which challenges the reader to engage in self-examination." ~ Seth Berg, South Broadway Ghost Society "The poems comprising Mouth Trap demonstrate sonic play, prosodic acrobatics, and wit both subtle and overt, sometimes in the same line." ~ Gabriel Welsch, Heavy Feather Review “With its rich, evocative music, this book presents us with a decidedly democratic buffet completely devoid of snobbery, where no tasty word is too far off on the amuse-bouche spectrum to be excluded. To read this book is to feast!” ~ Shane Book, author of Congotronic and Ceiling of Sticks “Mouth Trap drops the reader into a world that is at once elemental and evocative. Steinbeck would feel right at home in these gorgeously dust-filled landscapes, replete with chicken claws and cabbages, at least until the center falls away and we meet ‘a lady who aged into a tumbleweed’ or a character who offers ‘fleeting moments and a sack of teeth.’ In this artful blend of the sensuous and surreal, Rebbecca Brown delights us with her word play before she duct tapes us back to the reality that ‘This is not a tome to grow old in.’ Perhaps not, but Mouth Trap is a collection to savor for a good, long while.” ~ Melody Mansfield, author of The Life Stone of Singing Bird and A Bug Collection

A Pontiac Sunfire experiences Springsteen-esque glory days; women captivate with unusual beauty; a murderous sloth threatens a child. With plots that dive immediately into the absurd, Crerand captures the angst of existential crises, the search for meaning, and moments of depth and beauty through humor and attention to detail. This seven-story collection is funny, serious, and bizarre.

Crisscrossing through the small towns of Argentina to find a rare rock album, a middle-school teacher from Texas is forced to confront his understanding of the past. Through the language of music, Let It Be Our Ruin examines the myths of identity and historic realities. Rumors about a musician whose fame peaked during the Argentine Dirty War and teenage gossip about a high-school friend harmonize with the stories of nations to create a composition about grief, the multiple ways of speaking truth, and the blues.

Let It Be Our Ruin

Williams, Lee Tyler

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Books by Arc Pair Press

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Arc Pair Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Paper Life They Lead: Stories

Mouth Trap

Wake in the Night

Wake in the Night

Mouth Trap

The Paper Life They Lead: Stories

Let It Be Our Ruin