Misplaced Alice

by Matt Briggs

Misplaced Alice is a collection of seventeen deadpan stories. Many of the stories are only three pages long. They have appeared in magazines such as The Cortland Review, Chrysanthmum,Timber Creek, and ZYZZYVA.

I was highly invigorated by these stories. They’re such exquisitely crafted aperçus of the droll and the macabre. Very Hitchcockian. The focus of the stories becomes very acute; the severe compression causes grotesque acts to appear even more grotesque. – John Olson, author of Echoe Regime and Oxbow Kazoo

In this new collection of stories, Matt Briggs reminds us of the ordinary strangeness of strange and ordinary lives. Like the best in contemporary literature, his stories make the familiar unfamiliar and thus remind us to take a second look at who we are. Briggs understands the two-sidedness of life, how many ordinary situations can be comforting and disturbing at the same time. Sometimes he puts me in mind of Raymond Carver’s stories. Other times he reminds me of the off-kilter world of Russell Edson. This is a striking new collection, one that should draw the attention of everyone who is interested in what is happening in contemporary short fiction. – Jim Heynen, author of You Know What is Right and The One-Room Schoolhouse

Briggs knows how to get through a story. His manner is to write sentences that are short and intense and seem to get ahead of themselves–producing the druggy, somewhat dizzying effect of contrived propulsion as he charges right through the kind of subject matter other writers would deliberate over dolorously. – The Seattle Weekly

As accurate as Briggs’ realistic settings are, it is this amorphous “something else” seeping through his new book that makes it seem so “Northwest” to me. These are stories about different kinds of misplacement, like the sense you get after you have come west to the end of the country and know there is nowhere further left to go. – Rebecca Brown, The Stranger

Here we have 17 short stories from a Seattle author. They run at you like a puppy, flop, play, purr (it’s an odd puppy, isn’t it?), sometimes play dead until they jump up at you. From Ida, who makes very good bacon for breakfast, through a little monkey in a big cage in an apartment, to David and his father and how they like their coffee, these sprightly and often grotesque stories are witty and sharp and would have delighted Alfred Hitchcock. You might have to special-order the book. It’s more than worth it. – Dan Hays, The Statesmen Journal

Pick up a copy of this tiny gem from one of the Northwest’s most interesting small presses. – Willamette Weekly

69 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Matt Briggs grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley, raised by working-class, counter-culture parents who cultivated and sold cannabis. Briggs has written two books set in rural Washington chronicling this life, The Remains of River Names and Shoot the Buffalo. Critic Ann Powers wrote of Briggs first book in the New York Times Book Review, "Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out." Briggs has published a number of collection of stories, including The Moss Gatherers and The End is the Beginning. Of his stories, Jim Feast wrote in the American Book Review, "All of Briggs’s zigzagging stories are told with great attention to the details of lowbrow culture and the contours of the American Northwest."

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this years ago. Why did I forget to add it to my book list? Why was it misplaced among my book-reading memories? Certainly not because I didn't like it? It's a wonderful collection of short stories. Many of them very tiny.

Is it Matt's fault, maybe? Did he somehow CAUSE this to happen? Did he embed within the stories in the book some sort of CODE? Did the code WORK ON ME in some way?

Am I hypnotized? Should I continue to trust myself? Maybe not, Goodreads. Maybe not.

Read this book. Tell me if it WORKS on YOU, as well. We'll compare notes.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of interesting short stories...there was only one I could absolutely not read.