The Pillow Museum: Stories

by Claire Bateman

A collection of 56 flash fictions, micro-essays, and contemporary fables about the burden on women and families


The Pillow Museum is a collection of 56 flash fictions, micro-essays, and contemporary fables set in various simulacra of our world. Claire Bateman’s gorgeous prose captures the imagination with closely observed details of people and places that are startlingly familiar yet unreal, where nothing can be taken for granted, including narrative "It was snowing the night they had the fight about the glass piano whose music provided all the light in the house."


In an authoritative voice that offers no apologies or justifications, The Pillow Museum evokes a closely observed slipstream strangeness that refuses to take any moment or detail for granted—a fruitful, delirious disruption.

200 pages, Paperback

Published January 15, 2025

Reviews

[Brett Busang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Regarding Claire Bateman’s “The Pillow Museum” by Brett Busang

In real life - assuming there is one - poet Clare Bateman might be the first amomg her peers to shout “Fire!” inside of a theatre while distributing extinguishers the size of aerosol cans.  And, in real life, she might be awarded for it.  Yet in the provisional realities within which she comes to life on the page, no theater ever catches fire, though it may be permitted to soar, as little Dorothy’s did on the way to Oz, as the second act begins - or a thickening of the plot is discerned - and between touching down there and coming back home, she will tell you a story.  And, if you don’t believe it, she can, with the force of the fantastic and the authority of the altitude she has achieved, tell you that it isn’t her fault, but yours.  

Welcome to Ms. Bateman’s “The Pillow Museum” - and heaven help you, if it can.  Once you’re in it, there’s no getting out.  And the ride is not merely a wild one, it is inflected with impossible expectations; tables turned every which way; and plot-lines skewed so well past ordinary parameters that the steering wheel that’s come off is par for the course.  And never mind the scalp at your neck tingling as it does; or what hair that may have survived is standing on end; you are there and you might as well dig in.

Her story cycle comprises so many phases, units, and genres that it might be irrelevant to sort them out. They are briskly, though comprehensively, told; meanderingly motorized; and within the stories’ constitutional structures and whirling parameters, unbelievably authentic.  You can’t ask, with an alarmed incredulity, “Am I here?”  You bloody well know it! And you want to stay badly enough that you might care to duck should someone threaten to take you away.  (To get out alive, you’ve got to stay the course!)

And you’d better look sharp, pay attention, and knuckle under!

Fortunately, the pleasure of participation comes with a golden ticket.  You want to do what Ms. Bateman says.  She’s the sorcerer’s apprentice and after you’re struck with her wand, you want to breach the barriers ahead of you. And you want to be precisely where she wants you to be.

Good luck. Here are the keys.  Come back if you can.  (Or have any inclination).

[Amy Pence · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’ve not yet read a Claire Bateman book, then you’ve missed how the comic and the fantastical can so exquisitely unite with the bureaucracies of the mundane to become a third thing: a small and haunting textual (and textural) beauty. In her 11th collection, The Pillow Museum, Bateman’s 56 micro-fictions become even more urgent and piercing: children collect errant extra-terrestrials, the tired population text only thought bubbles, our “devices” are multifarious mis-communicators, and the animals have abandoned us. The sky has tears, and people try to unearth themselves “from millennia of clutter” in the face of extinction. What Bateman calls her “speculative curiosity” is always tuned to the mystical musings of the heart. In my favorite, “The House Sitter,” the educated sitter must tame fractious houses and with each turn, we understand how nurturing abandoned houses is so like crafting small fictions out of the ether. Buy this book-- you will not be disappointed!

[William Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been waiting to read Claire Bateman's fiction because I know how gifted a poet she is, but this was not what I expected. This collection is exactly the collection I've been waiting for for a long time. Most of the stories are flash fiction, quick one or two page fables. I see them as a quick dive in and out of an underwater world. This is poetic prose at its best! My only complaint is the font (not the author's fault). I have pretty good eyesight for print reading and this was a strain to read even with glasses. I wish they would've blew up that font for a better reading experience.