Attention Please Now

by Matthew Pitt

Attention Please Now is the winner of the 2009 Autumn House Fiction Prize, selected by Sharon Dilworth.The characters in Matthew Pitt's debut short story collection strive to blend into the background only to wind up emerging from or being prodded past the scrims of convention. Some do it bravely; others with reckless abandon. In "The Mean," a cancer-stricken, high school math teacher's plan to live out his days in quiet moderation shatters, after he befriends a gang of stoner dropouts. In "Au Lieu des Fleurs," Parisian prankster-anarchist Mouna Aguigui visits a grieving office worker in his bowl of soup, nudging him and others to commit madcap acts of agitation. In "Kokomo," a young boy living in a rural Indiana community becomes attuned to a piercing hum a noise that may presage apocalyptic events. And in the title story, a public address announcer entertains crowds by airing the local baseball team's dirty laundry for the entire stadium to hear. Throughout the people inside these eleven stories are jolted awake, alert, and alive by patchwork alliances, bracing humor, and episodes of surreal grace. Matthew Pitt is a writer who understands and explores the strange balance between the serious and the comic, the quirky and the familiar. Irresistibly complex, always imaginative, these stories showcase an immensely talented writer grappling with the ironies and difficulties of life in the new century.This is a collection in which, according to the Sun Herald of Biloxi, Gulfport & South Mississippi, "you find yourself hurtling toward an ending or denouement that is both frightening and seductive."More praise for Attention Please remarkable debut by a brilliant young writer.--Brian MortonAuthor, Starting Out in the EveningThe world in these taut, finely wrought stories is and is not the world we know. Pitt pushes his characters to the edge of the possible with a fabulist's eye for the strange, potent detail and the realist's sure grasp of human emotion. A piquant, funny, original debut.--Rachel PastanAuthor, Lady of the SnakesThe central characters of these remarkable stories are oddly ordinary and inordinately that is to say, they are each uniquely qualified to speak for life outside of fiction. Pitt allows them to build the worlds they inhabit from their very particular understandings of what life is, thus endowing their narratives with unpredictable outcomes, and startlingly unexpected revelations along the way. Attention Please Now is a collection possessed of a genuine fictional beauty.--Chuck WachtelAuthor / Professor, New York University

Genres: Short Stories

160 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2010

Reviews

[Ramona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the pacing, energy and uniqueness of these stories. I look forward to read more by this author.