Sing the Song

by Meredith Alling

After steadily garnering attention and gaining fans with her appearances in various magazines and websites, Meredith Alling comes out with her debut collection of stories, Sing the Song. For fans of writers like Diane Williams, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, and Amelia Gray, Alling's debut will signal the arrival of a new unique voice in fiction.

Featuring 27 stories in 130 pages, Alling's collection is propulsive, dangerous, often funny, and powered by a language that wrestles with anxiety and the unexpected surrealism of modern life. With an ancient ham crawling out from a sewer to tell fortunes, a lone blonde at a party for redheads, and a mother outsmarting a masked criminal, Sing the Song bleeds and breathes with dreamlike surprise.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

130 pages, Paperback

First published November 18, 2016

About the author

Meredith Alling is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her debut full-length collection, SING THE SONG, is out now from Future Tense Books.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took my first fiction-writing workshop in the late '80s. Readers were enthralled with realist fiction that sought to represent the lives of contemporary Americans in a way I found artless and boring. These stories were popular in fiction workshops because, lacking metaphors and rhetorical flourishes, they were easy to read, easy to discuss, easy to imitate. I hated it.

One of my English professors assigned the book Sudden Fiction, an anthology of extremely short stories and, for the first time, I encountered contemporary American writing that was truly weird. The collection had stories from popular realists such as Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver, but it also had strange postmodern stories by Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover and Lydia Davis. One story in particular held my attention: "The Artichoke" by Marilyn Krysl.

I didn't understand the story. I wasn't even sure what was going on, but I loved it. It was rich and mysterious, yet only a few hundred words long. This, I thought, was for me.

Every once in a while I encounter a work of very short fiction that provides the same thrill of discovering something new while redefining what a short story can be. Meredith Alling's Sing the Song (Future Tense Books) is one such book. The stories are very short, very strange and, if you can wrap your head around what's going on, utterly unforgettable.

Take this brief excerpt from one of the stranger stories, "Go Quiet": "Maybe a dog doesn't remember if you cut off its tail when it's a puppy, but maybe it does. The long part of the tail in some trash heap next to an empty potato can. Maybe it finds its way into the can and coils up in the starchy runoff."
The excerpt infers an act of horrific violence the narrator committed, observed or is imagining as a way of distancing her pain. The second sentence is a fragment, not a true sentence in a strict grammatical sense, but places the tail in a setting. The existence of the tail, its life after its separation from the dog, refutes the violence, even though that refutation is nonsensical.

Alling's stories live in the maybe, the part of existence in between the known and the unknowable, between what one can remember and what is lost forever. Many of the stories present familiar situations and take them to ridiculous extremes. In "Whistling Baby" a young woman is chastised for her lack of enthusiasm in a way that feels like a fable about social media. "Insubordination" imagines a home invasion as a relationship that quickly runs its course when the invader doesn't find what he's looking for and refuses to leave.

Alling's wildly imaginative tales hit the right note for these strange and terrible times.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of stories unfolds in so many weird, wonderful, unexpected ways. The narrators seem like they're straddling between anxiety and rebellion and the periphery characters seem mildly threatening but with a strong real-life magnetism. I'm proud to publish this collection--one that seems to vibrate in your palms--and I'm excited for you to discover this fantastic writer.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, loved this. Every word counts. Every detail matters somehow and I felt like I became every single one of her weird characters in every single story and in some way that made me feel better. Gorgeous and unsettling, and kinda hopeful. I want everyone to read this book.

[Kevin Maloney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alling has written a weird little masterpiece. Every page sets itself on fire and burns your fingers while you read it. Touches of Amelia Gray, Lydia Davis and Miranda July. Get it, read it, love it. [lightning bolt emoji]

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weirdly perfect. Perfectly weird. With Didionesque preciseness these short stories manipulate reality, making you wonder “what if I could switch my brain to that channel permanently...” But just as you adjust to this new normal, the last few stories punch you in the gut with some major realness.

[Jan Stinchcomb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this little book and slip into another world. Imagining a different reality is hard work and Meredith Alling has done just that.

[Jason Diamond · Rating 5 out of 5]

A small collection (in terms of pages) of stories with an abundance of energy, Alling's weird little collection is strange and raw, but also a super fast read. The thing you come away wondering is how she fit so much into such small spaces and still came out with over two dozen stories that you can't help but read all the way through.

[Matt Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opening lines can make or break entire novels. Meredith Alling has taken this kind of thinking to heart, as evidenced in the first sentence of her story, “Ancient Ham”...

Read the rest here: http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2016/11/2...

[Siel Ju · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I felt that I had done something wrong, ruined something or hurt someone or killed someone.”
*
Meredith Alling’s short story collection captures that strange, unexplained sense of foreboding and anxiety — the sense you’ve done something terrible or some bad thing is just going to happen…. It’s a slim, pocket sized volume you can take out in a day!

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book makes me stand on my head. Dance the watusi. Run through the snow in my skivvies. It makes me feel like anything can happen, and anything will. This author, and yes I had the great fortune of making her acquaintance, is out of this world in terms of innovative, free-spirited, boogaloo. She makes hams talk, and people walk, neighbors whistle, and quarries quake. You have to wonder about a writer who can make a reader drool and everyone in the room notices. So what are you waiting for. GET A COPY OF SING THE SONG NOW!!!

[Gwen Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book breathes. It's the best book I read in 2016.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know if I just wasn't in the mood or what but this book didn't do much for me. I wanted to like it, I'm a big fan of the publisher, but too many of the stories struck me as being weird for the sake of being weird and that always turns me off. I definitely think there is an audience for this book, it just wasn't a great fit for me.

[Ryan Bradford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intricate, focused and unsettling. Pretty much the embodiment of anxiety on every page. Reading Alling's stories don't pander to the notion that reading makes you feel less alone; rather, it makes you feel like there's only you, but there are 1,000 yous.

[Amy]

Eggs. Plenty of eggs. Also, you do have to wash your thighs.

[Margaret Wappler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sing the Song is a strange, beguiling, cock-eyed little book. These micro-fictions slip into your brain as an amalgamation of reality and absurdist dream because everything feels familiar yet cracked off to the left. Great book to dip into when you want to touch sparks with your bare hands. I highly recommend.

[Daisy · Rating 4 out of 5]

pure, direct language

vivid sounds and smells

disturbing

endings that made me sigh and nod

themes like: being better; thighs; ugly

danger, right?

This is unlike anything I've ever read.

[Sara Habein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bonkers, fascinating, dream/nightmarish. Enjoyed this.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the best shorts I've ever read. Ever.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost nothing is original anymore but these stories are. Alling accesses a sort of everyday surrealism that is unique and surprising. Some of the situations she conjures are familiar but everything feels kind of Earth-adjacent. And she taps into particular anxieties that I can really identify with, though I also like the stories I don't "identify" with and not being able to isn't a DEALBREAKER. Even though I'm a fan of monster winding sentences a la Henry James, I like the way Alling uses shorter sentences for the most part. Not because they're short, but the way she uses them. I think it ramps up the anxious tension. I think my favorites so far are "Sample Sale" and "Whistle Baby".

[Shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Huh, you know when you read something and you are wondering what you are missing? That was how I felt reading these short stories. Maybe short...micro stories aren't my thing. The actual writing was good, but I felt so confused reading these stories.

I won this in a Goodreads' giveaway, but the opinion is all my own.

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightfully weird.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily my favorite short story collection I've read in the last five years. Absolutely wild. Every piece reads like a fever dream.