A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane

by Barry Yourgrau

The author put his "imagination in a dream state" to create a collection of very short stories that depict characters finding their pillows filled with bones and their fathers floating away like balloons. Original. 10,000 first printing. Tour.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, Literary Fiction, Flash Fiction

112 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 1983

About the author

Writer-performer Barry Yourgrau is author of "A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane: Stories" (new edition, May '17). His other books of surreal brief tales include "Wearing Dad's Head," "Haunted Traveller," and "The Sadness of Sex," in whose movie version he starred.

Audio of story, "Honky-Tonk,"" from "A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane" is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKPPj...

Barry is also the author of a memoir, "Mess." He has appeared on MTV and NPR, and workshopped at Sundance Theatre Lab.

Born in South Africa, he lives in New York and Istanbul and travels widely.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barry Yourgrau, born in South Africa in 1949 and living in New York City for many, many years

A book of dozens and dozens of one and two page micro-fictions where you will encounter bizarre happenings of all varieties, casts, shapes and sizes: a man climbs inside a cow, gentlemen in tuxedos perch in a tree, a couple of girls are locked up in an aquarium, a man comes home to find his wife in bed with a squirrel, there’s a bathtub filled with rutabagas, it snowing in a living room, a man rents two brown bears, sheep graze on a supermarket roof. Welcome to the world of Barry Yourgrau, located at the intersection of Freudian psychoanalysis, surrealist art and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. But wait, enough with the generalizations; here are the openings lines from three twisted Barry snappers:

HULA HORROR
It’s very late at night – very early in the morning. I’m in a thatched-roof hut. Earthen floor. Kerosene lamp. A girl – a fellow tourist – has gotten drunk and is now dancing just for me, lasciviously as she can manage, in the middle of the place. She sways and bobs, come-hither style. She’s stripped off her clothing and is attired solely in a ‘native’ grass hula skirt, colored pink.

I drink, as I have copiously all evening; the gramophone squalls, the lamp throws a melodramatic light, harsh, utterly black in the shadows. I keep time with my glass, thinking, Man, the brochures don’t tell you about this, and then a horrible realizations pops into my mind, like a window shade flying up. That pink skirt, I realize, my skin turning icy – that pink skirt is hideously evil: it’s an instrument of black magic, a voodoo booby-trap planted here on us two boozed-up, wooly-brained tourists.

VILLAGE LIFE
Country girls, red-cheeked and buxom, stand feet wide apart at a counter. They lean on it, elbows propped, forearms crossed. They chat. Their skirts are gathered above their waists.

An old man plods down the line of them with a bucket. He reaches in between the thighs of each girl and puts the fruit he brings out into the bucket. The girls laugh. The atmosphere is easy. They mock the old man, they make cracks and someone ruffles his few hairs.

ARS POETICA
A man comes in. He has a glass throat. You can see his larynx in there: a microphone disk, a little speaker horn. A mailman comes in with his big bag. He opens the small transparent hatch in the man’s throat and pushes in a couple of blue air letters. The man beings to recite – a wonderful poem about being jealous of the clouds; then another poem, not quite as good, about a forbidden voyage.

“So this is how poetry is made,” I think. “What are some other ways?
------------------------------------
And as a mini-tribute to my love of Barry’s wildly inventive fiction, I wrote this little prose poem:

THE QUAGMIRE
Barry is stuck in a real quagmire. He just performed his act which ended with his mounting a sheep and afterwards slitting its throat and hurling the sheep out a third story window. The women organizers of his performance, much to his surprise, found his act disagreeable right from the start. They went ahead and called the police. The officers could see blood smeared all over the walls and floor. “Sir, we invited him to perform his flash fiction. We never expected anything like this!” In his turn, Barry told the officers about a bog of emotion and a marshland of gut feelings that must be expressed in more than just words. The police didn’t buy a word of it and hauled him away. What an abysmal ending to his performance. Barry has landed himself in a real quagmire. He has a nut to crack and no sheep to crack it with.

[Aravindakshan Narasimhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barry Yourgrau is a unique voice in literary world. Whose world observes the fantastic in the mundane with heightened vividness and also observes the natural world with its peculiar absurdity. You get a dichotomy. One may take sometime to get used to this world, but once you are taken into it and respond to its rhythms, you will crave for more. Though I write under "A man jumps out of an airplane", I am also thinking about "Wearing dad's head" while I write this. Perhaps the duality of his writing content is best shines in one story according to me.

Check this:

Ars Poetica

A man comes in. He has a glass throat. You can see his larynx in there: a microphone
disk, a little speaker horn. A mailman comes in with his big bag. He opens the small transparent
hatch in the man's throat and pushes in a couple of blue air letters. The man begins to recite -- a
wonderful poem about being jealous of the clouds; then another poem, not quite as good, about a
forbidden voyage.
"So this is how poetry is made," I think. "What are some other ways?"
A man in a baggy checkered suit climbs down a ladder from the ceiling. He carries a
bucket. In the bucket, beautifully colored fish are swimming. They have been painted. The water
rumbles with their brightness. The man crouches and rolls his eyes about and manipulates his
hands mysteriously over the bucket. He murmurs in a strange tongue. Nothing at all happens, but
it's really quite marvelous just the same.

His world is like some knead, where humans turn into opposite sexes, shrinks, expands, animals takes human qualities, inanimate changes to animate. Reality dissolves. perhaps dissolves isn't the right word. There is no yardstick to match his world with the reality we live.

Check this beautiful story:

Primavera

I go for a walk at night in a school yard in the country. It's early spring. I come around the
corner of one of the old wooden buildings, and this is what I see: a hurricane lamp hangs glowing
from a tree. In its light a naked man is bent over a naked young girl whose head is in a metal
washtub. At first I think, blushing, that they're doing some sex thing bobbing for apples, and I
turn to go away; but then I see the guy is in fact holding down the girl's head in the tub: she
squirms around, like she's choking.
I hurry towards them yelling. The guy turns around. He smiles as I come up. He's
middle-aged and healthy-looking. He holds one hand on the girl's neck and gestures with the
other. "It's a fertility rite," he explains pleasantly. "Are you kidding?" I tell him. The girl's hair is
spread out in the water, and she squirms and grunts and paws softly at the grass. I reach out for
his wrist to make him let go, and he gives a cry and tries to ward me off, and we get involved in
an awkward, shifting, tugging struggle, made all the more bizarre there under the lamp by his
nakedness. Finally we lose our balance together and sprawl violently over the girl and the tub,
knocking everything all over the place.
I manage to pull free out of the tangle and get to my knees. The tub is upended on its side
in front of an expanding, glistening pool; the girl droops in the grass, hacking, her skinny chest
heaving. I stare at her, dumbfounded: with each watery cough of hers, the air fills with tiny fruits
and flowers. They sift around her onto the grass, pale and stunted, a garden of puny litter.
"See what you've done?" the guy says. He sits next to me, rubbing his shoulder. He looks
miserable. "Will you look at that measly stuff! Man," he groans, "don't you know anything about
the seasons?"


And is there better way to portray Texas (I have never read one like this) :

Texas


Some guys are driving through Texas. They're groggy and dazed from all the hours, the
awesome monotony. On all sides, they see nothing: scrub plain, as if the earth were flat. There is
a smooth line drawn in the dust under the sky. It's the horizon. They drive towards it. The engine
drones. Sometimes, a small, single shape appears in the distance. They watch it as it grows,
mysteriously. It reproduces. It enlarges, upwards, in creeping increments. Suddenly, it acquires
detail: it becomes buildings: a city. For a few strange minutes, they're in it. The fact of scale
dazzles them. They crane their necks, watching through the rear window as first the details go.
They watch the shapes begin to sink, by gradual increments, all the way into the distance -- until
there's only the horizon, smooth, dusty, and they're back in the center of a flat world.
This is Texas. Their eyes glaze. They look at each other. They stare blankly and rub their
cheeks. They have nothing to say. They see miles of scrub desert in the windows. They stare off
ahead, stupefied, waiting for the next speck to appear, to start to reproduce and rise.
Way down near Galveston, a scrawny, crewcut kid in Levis and pointed boots gets tired.
The sun's high. His hands are all torn up from turning the big crank handle. He decides to sneak
off and go swimming. He pulls off his clothes and jumps into the Gulf. He floats on his back,
spouting water. His blisters sting. He thinks: "To hell with those guys in the car!"

Have a good laugh at this:

Domestic Farce

A man comes home and finds his wife in bed with a squirrel. He stands in the bedroom
doorway, gaping at them. The wife stares back in fright over the covers, which are drawn up over
her nose. The squirrel's little head peeps out similarly beside her. The culprits look so idiotic
together that the man can't help himself, he bursts out laughing. He sees the nuts strewn all over
his wife's clothes on the floor and the sight makes him positively howl so he has to clutch onto
the door frame to support himself. The wife and the squirrel exchange wide-eyed glances; but
then they catch the bug themselves, and slowly they start to chuckle -- the wife in fearful,
whimpering surges, the squirrel in its high, hysterical tweeting. Soon all restraints are by the
boards; the room rocks with the jangle and din of mirth going full blast.
Then abruptly the husband stops laughing. His face turns ashen. He disappears from the
doorway. The wife sits up; she calls out his name. There's no answer. She darts a look of terrible
concern at the squirrel and she clambers out of bed and rushes naked out the door. The squirrel
twitches in the bedclothes. It hears voices, shouts, and it hops up onto the pillow, down onto the
floor, grabs up an armful of nuts, leaps onto the window sill, pauses dead still in attentive silence,
and then hops onto the fire escape. At this exact instant the blade of an axe crashes down onto the
window ledge. The squirrel bolts onto a nearby tree limb, spraying nuts everywhere. "You and
your goddamned pets!" the man screams in the bedroom, above the caterwaul of sobbing. The
squirrel races from tree to tree until it is far away down the block. It fetches up finally in some
top branches to catch its breath. Its little heart pitter-patters. The wind carries up to it the scraps
of agitated voices; the sunlight makes a glinting speck of the axe head in the distant window. The
squirrel sits among the leaves, switching its tail back and forth. It thinks, "Where the hell does he
get off calling me a 'pet'!"


The title story:

Soup bone

A man jumps out of an airplane. Sobbing, he empties a shoe box of love letters into the
whooshing air. The letters shoot up and stick against the puffy bottoms of some clouds. The man
looks, and groans unhappily, but then gets caught back up in the tumult of falling. He gulps and
clutches at his head but his hat is long since gone. A cloud rushes up under his feet and the man
cringes and crashes into it. The cloud flings him up into the air, as if it were foam rubber. He
sprawls back down onto it in a heap. It's a tiny cloud and the man clings to it, desperately, like a
shipwreck survivor hanging on to the side of a barrel.
He looks around. Out of nowhere, something hits right next to him and bounces away into
the sky: it's a big soup bone, the kind dogs love. The man looks up and sees the looming,
onrushing image of a dalmatian hurtling towards him. The dog barks and flails as if skidding on
vertical ice. Its tongue trails up over its nose, its ears stream straight up. The man gives a shout
and frantically flaps his feet to try to maneuver out of the way. The dog crashes right on top of
him. The cloud heaves violently. The man almost loses his grip. The dog scrambles and slides
down the man's leg and hangs on to an ankle. "Let go, let go," the man shouts at it. He kicks
furiously with the leg but the dog hangs on for dear life, whining, eyes shut tight. "You dumb
mutt, let go!" the man screams. He feels his aching fingers slipping. He gives a terrific leg shake
and then frantically lets go with one hand to deliver a wild, desperate punch. He misses. The
cloud capsizes and pops loose. Screaming and whining and barking, the man and the dog tumble
headlong into the wide blue sky.

I should thank Glen Russel, whose review I read years back and made a bookmark of this writer. Else I wouldn't have discovered this amazing and unique writer.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such an interesting approach to flash. It's not quite like anything else. So strange, fleeting and non-graspable. Sometimes I wish it could be grasped a little more, but there we are. It wouldn't be what it is if it was.

[Maryka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barry Yourgrau writes down those dreams you forget when the alarm goes off. I love the
spareness of his style--most of these stories are a page to a page-and-a-half long--
and the weirdness of content. After reading a few, you easily slip into a slightly surreal dimension and its logic soon feels quite comfortable. It's the refreshing sorbet between
courses of standard fiction.

[Chaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is truly a fun/carnivallike collection of short surreal stories -- between 500 and about 1000 words each. Anyone looking for an escape from reality or a tool to guide your own daydreams will really enjoy this compilation. I kept thinking of these stories as a swim inside a Dali painting, interwoven with Phish soundscapes, Sesame Street ish characters who have Playboy tendencies.

There's some really interesting scenarios; a man goes inside of a cow on a bet -- a guy with a last cigarette on earth but no matches tries to seduce a woman who has the fire-- he finds out that he was seduced by her and loses his cigarette -- and dozens of more wild/surreal/sensual tales that are incredibly twisted and provocative.

My only wish is that he expect would expand some of his stories into short novels or even short stories. I was always left feeling I wanted to read a little more.

[Suzanneyada · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surreal short stories. And I mean short. Each one is anywhere from 1-4 pages long. But they go much deeper in their metaphors. A sampling of opening lines from the stories: "A man climbs into a cow on a bet." "It's snowing in the living room." "A man comes home and finds his wife in bed with a squirrel." "On the bus, I meet a guy who says his hobby is jails."

It's poetry and prose, fiction but more than fiction. It's a short, quick, trippy read. Though there's too many stories about naked girls than I particularly care for, some of these stories will stay with you long after you finish them. You'll probably have a favorite.

[Charlaralotte · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think these short short stories would make good songs. The Beatles could have used them for lyrics. Not sure they work so well as short short stories.

I did love "The Joke:" A mother and son both decide to wear disguises when they meet. And neither can understand why the other is looking so weird. It haunts their relationship forever.

Otherwise, I'd rather read something by Yourgrau that lasts a bit longer & develops into something substantial. This book wreaks of flippancy. Or maybe I'm just jealous.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A true masterpiece, this collection of flash fiction is like a smorgasbord of rich and exotic desserts, each sweeter and more colorful than the previous.

While absolutely absurdist in content, Mr. Yourgrau gives us a lot to ponder and analyze in this series of dream-like episodes. A true treasure that should be shared and savored.

[Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

An unusual collection of short stories. I like stories that have a definite beginning, middle and end. Some of these stories met that criteria, others didn't but seemed like they could be the start of a longer story. Some of the more interesting ones were "Milk," "Domestic Farce," "On the Lake," and the very surreal story where the books title comes from "Soup Bone."

[Curt Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yourgrau's books that I've read (this one and "Wearing Dad's Head") are hard to rate and ratings are pretty much irrelevant because my criticism that individual mini-stories are often pointless and little more than scenarios have no part in their ultimate payoff for me. They are so stimulating to my own parallel imagination that I have started constructing fantasies/hallucinations of my own and found them great fun. Yourgrau liberates! I don't really believe that these constructs are the author's dreams, written as experienced, though some readers posit that. They are more like fantasies seen through a Surrealist lens that imitate dreams. But it really doesn't matter where they come from; the whole concept of this kind of writing is liberating, and I am having a ball writing my own. So you might think of them as a template, a how-to book. Barry's aren't so superior as literature that someone else can't do as well, not that we shouldn't doff our hats for his innovative genre. It may have roots in folklore or Gogol or Kafka but the brevity is his own.

[Stewart Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this one in between others on my breaks at work and I enjoyed most of it. Flash fiction probably just isn't my thing, but Yourgrau's got a great voice, and if you can stop trying to excavate meaning from everything (i.e. if you can stop being me), it's easy to get swept up in his dreamlike imagination. My favorite thing about this book (which I really should be rating 4 stars, I think) is just how much it reminds me of Barthelme's Sixty Stories, and how that collection drew me into worlds so absurd that everything started to make a surreal sort of sense, a cloudy clarity.

I think I'll be reading Yourgrau again, and I think I'll enjoy him even more next time, now that I know what I'm in for.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poet Tom Snarsky (bless him) sent me a prose poem / microfiction / short story from 1983 called "The Joke". It was a scan from some obscure old publication (JSC Poetry Publications) and I liked it so much that I had to read more of the author's work. The author was Barry Yourgrau and his collection A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane is a series of 1-3 page stories, many of which are only one paragraph in length. They're funny, they're slapstick, they're sexual, they're odd, and they're often very lonely and heartbreaking. My kind of writing. A book you can start and finish on a lazy Sunday.

Here's the scan of the journal, with two of Yourgrau's pieces, if you'd like to dig: https://www.martinstannard.com/jsc/js...

[S. Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

While Yourgrau's one and two page short stories - or flash fiction - are concise, poetic, and imaginative, they really didn't leave much an impression on me. Much like Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane Williams, this feels more like a collection of revised notebook (or dream journal) entries than it does deliberate prose, and never manages to cross the line into successful experimental fiction. A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane doesn't necessarily fail, but it doesn't quite succeed, either.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like Ben Loory, you'll love these stories. Yourgrau is a little more comedic and accessible than, say, Diane Williams (who I also adore) but he's got a definite talent for lucid dreaming and really knows how to bring the absurd. A few of these qualify as minor masterpieces. Flash Fictioneers owe Yourgrau a large debt.

[Genevieve · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Silly, surreal, and sometimes superficial. I wish some of these stories were longer to allow for the ideas to develop more. Yourgrau has the ability to really paint a picture with his words and create twisty, odd worlds.

[Geoff Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every bit as surreal and curiously satisfying as I'd remembered. The lesser stories elicit a chuckle or at least a smile, while the greater ones are profiundly disorienting. A pleasure to read.

[Patrick Probably DNF · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't care for flash fiction, but I do enjoy insanity, surrealism and originality. You'll find those all here in Barry Yourgrau's debut collection. Have fun!

[in8 · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://5cense.com/22/989.htm

[Tamara]

Colbert rec

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

you’re a real weirdo barry, but i like your style.

[Alona · Rating 3 out of 5]

While these are all great stories, I think they would have appreciated more if I'd read them in college. Might have also stopped me from writing about 75% of what I wrote. I prefer his collection, The Sadness of Sex.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good second book from Yourgrau, like candy.

[Hilary · Rating 3 out of 5]

OMG, SO weird. It's like every weird dream you've ever had written down in detail. People made of snowballs, frogs getting back at you. A fun, light read -- moderately creepy. :)

[Emily Detrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yourgrau stories are like Jack Handy - only read one or two at a time or they lose their magic.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

When he's good he's very very good.

[Keith Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yourgrau's minimalist stories read like transcribed dreams; like dreams they have their own internal logic while being completely surreal.

[marekoromo · Rating 5 out of 5]

荒唐無稽な話のようで、ああ、こういう夢見るなと共感出来る所も。話の飛び方も夢の中の特徴がよく書かれている。

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories remind me of snapshots that might be shared by Bukowski, if Bukowski was still twisted, but less of an asshole.

[Richard · Rating 1 out of 5]

. hate to trash talk but this is a very lazy book.

[Kathryn Born · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest book of short stories I ever read. I used to study this book, reading it over and over, trying to figure out how to write like that.