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Flying Fish
Twenty-nine year old Devon is a luckless fisherman who ekes out a living on Hogg Island, a cork of rock and misery off the New England coast. He has no future, no opportunities, and only one last vestige of hope: a liaison with the mysterious and perhaps magical Louisa Cecelia Christensen, aka Queenie, the island’s maker of shadowboxes and miracles. Queenie is a bit of a miracle herself, a woman over 200 years old who has not physically aged beyond her adolescence. Local legend claims that an assignation with Queenie can either make a man his fortune or secure him an early grave. As Devon sees it, either fate would be an improvement.
In this shadowbox of a novella, stories within stories reveal the magic underlying the mundane. Proclaimed as “a masterful storyteller” by the New York Times Book Review, and as a “wordsmith extraordinaire” by Booklist, Randall Silvis has crafted in Flying Fish yet another poignant and powerful tale of life’s numinosity. As Jeff VanderMeer, editor of Best American Fantasy said of Randall Silvis’s acclaimed In A Town Called Mundomuerto, “Silvis's haunting prose renders reality strange whether anything actually fantastical occurs in his books or not.
In this shadowbox of a novella, stories within stories reveal the magic underlying the mundane. Proclaimed as “a masterful storyteller” by the New York Times Book Review, and as a “wordsmith extraordinaire” by Booklist, Randall Silvis has crafted in Flying Fish yet another poignant and powerful tale of life’s numinosity. As Jeff VanderMeer, editor of Best American Fantasy said of Randall Silvis’s acclaimed In A Town Called Mundomuerto, “Silvis's haunting prose renders reality strange whether anything actually fantastical occurs in his books or not.
60 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
3 people are currently reading
17 people want to read
About the author
Randall Silvis
48 books306 followersRandall Silvis is the internationally acclaimed author of over a dozen novels, one story
collection, and one book of narrative nonfiction. Also a prize-winning playwright, a
produced screenwriter, and a prolific essayist, he has been published and produced in
virtually every field and genre of creative writing. His numerous essays, articles, poems and short stories have appeared in the Discovery Channel magazines, The Writer, Prism International, Short Story International, Manoa, and numerous other online and print magazines. His work has been translated into 10 languages.
Silvis’s many literary awards include two writing fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Award, six fellowships for his fiction, drama, and screenwriting from the Pennsylvania Council On the Arts, and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree awarded for “distinguished literary achievement.”
collection, and one book of narrative nonfiction. Also a prize-winning playwright, a
produced screenwriter, and a prolific essayist, he has been published and produced in
virtually every field and genre of creative writing. His numerous essays, articles, poems and short stories have appeared in the Discovery Channel magazines, The Writer, Prism International, Short Story International, Manoa, and numerous other online and print magazines. His work has been translated into 10 languages.
Silvis’s many literary awards include two writing fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Award, six fellowships for his fiction, drama, and screenwriting from the Pennsylvania Council On the Arts, and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree awarded for “distinguished literary achievement.”
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July 15, 2017
With deftly applied brush strokes, Silvis transports the reader into a world where one magical woman has the power to reverse the downward spiral of a young man's life. Inside the beautifully rendered tale, Devin, the protagonist pens two short stories and a poem. These works add to the complexity and meaning of the overall story and demonstrate his personal evolution.
Displaying 1 of 1 review