The stories in this collection by Dan Crawley fit together like beautiful puzzle pieces to create a portrait of a broken family on the world’s worst road trip: a father dragging his wife and children into his dreams; a mother wishing for her own kind of freedom; their children, trapped in their parents’ narrative, wanting to create their own. Each piece is its own story, powerful in its own right, but together they create a beautiful, heartbreaking whole.
— Cathy Ulrich, author of Ghosts of You
As if it were some rediscovered Raymond Carver manuscript, this is a classic novella-in-flash in the mainstream American tradition. A working class family try to keep themselves afloat, travelling the country by car after the father quits his job. The writing is warmly affectionate towards the characters even though they’re flawed. There’s an appealing, breezy, summery quality even though real tension bubbles up – it feels like an authentic family dynamic. Some bond of grudging love is keeping this family together, even though they’re stretched to breaking point. Each flash has the clarity of a distinct memory – like each one might be a family legend. A vivid and highly effective novella-in-flash.
— Michael Loveday, author of Three Men on the Edge
I admire the agility and surprise, the ferocity of this book’s verbal sleights of hand, Straight Down the Road is so wonderfully inventive, and emotionally precise. Crawley’s stories contain speaker’s voices that don’t suppress, voices and conflicts that brim with verve, rueful humor, and a new topography between head and heart. This is a writer who pressures language and transforms into improvisational, masterfully controlled, and yet fragile constructions. An intensely gripping collection.
— Robert Vaughan, author of Funhouse, EIC of Bending Genres
This novella-in-flash chronicles a joyful family road trip that quickly gives way to instability and uncertainty. Unmoored, and with an increasingly threadbare safety net beneath them, a couple and their gaggle of kids have no choice but to keep moving. Told with exquisite attention to detail, and an eye for all that is peculiar, arresting, and emblematic of America in the 70s, Dan Crawley’s Straight Down the Road is a gorgeous and unforgettable debut.
— Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works
Paperback; ISBN 978-1-912095-91-96; 196mm x 134mm; 68pp
£8.49 GBP
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An ‘ensemble cast’ novella with a fresh and original concept — a sequence of stories about a teacher’s pupils at a school. The students’ eccentricities, rebelliousness and vulnerabilities are depicted with warmth, fondness, and very often, an absolutely heart-breaking poignancy, as in the case of the child with brittle bones, or the young boy grieving his sister. There is black humour too, in places, and endings that are intensely lyrical. The characterisations are superbly individualised, vivid, inventive and memorable, and are written with beautiful variety of expression. A novella of immense charm that has real emotional substance.
‘This novella-in-flash, a historical fiction encompassing the Second World War and telling the story of a Norwegian family from 1933 to 1970, has more epic sweep than many novels. A powerful novella of real substance, bold technique and readerly appeal, it’s the kind of literary fiction that would grace the shelves of any bookstore and find a passionate readership.’
Avery, a young widow from Iowa, travels to Nepal to connect with her late husband’s roots. Though she knows no more than that his village was called Baghmara, she’s willing to visit every Baghmara in the country if she must. But when she meets a young Nepali woman, Putali, and her mother, Khusbhu – two women also struggling to build new lives for themselves – Avery becomes more embroiled in the chaotic energy of the living than the histories of the dead, pursuing a connection far deeper than the one for which she’d been searching. Birds with Horse Hearts explores the entangled lives of three women as they navigate grief, freedom, and their own journeys to find people to call family and places to call home.
the everrumble is a poetic imagining of intense focus and sweeping ideas. Zettie’s story is fluid and in motion, transcending geographies and time. She stops talking, at age seven, and starts to listen – to the worlds she finds in language and books, and to the people and places she encounters as she moves across continents. Her silence connects her to people, to nature and to the elemental world. Magical and beyond boundaries, this collection focuses on small fragments, taking Zettie, and the reader, inevitably to the place where human history began.
In Finding a Way, Diane Simmons chronicles a family navigating loss. Told from various perspectives, this series of connected flashes finds words where so many cannot. The often indescribable is distilled in a way that is fresh and full of deep emotional understanding. This debut collection is both delicate and impactful, and the stories within are among the rare that will move any reader.
A collection of three flash fiction novellas from the second Bath Flash Fiction Award which demonstrate the range and scope of this exciting and innovative genre.
Three winning flash fiction novellas from the 2017 Bath Novella-in-Flash Award demonstrate the scope and range of this increasingly popular genre.