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Every Day There is Something About Elephants
Timothy Gager’s, fourteenth book, Every Day There is Something about Elephants consists of 108 flash fictions, ranging from 72 to 1,159 words. Every story has appeared previously in print or on the web. The stories show the range within the form of flash fiction, from narrative poem, shorter short story, to trips to bizarro-world where strange events evoke solid meaning and metaphor. Timothy has had over 500 total works features and these 108 are the best of the best. __________________________________ "These stories by Timothy Gager are skewed, off-center, off-balance and an absolute delight to read. They begin strange, then fill like a balloon of strangeness about to pop, except they don't. They bob and quiver on your palm like so much lime jello. Oddly moving and always thought provoking, Every Day There is Something about Elephants is Lydia Davis meets Etgar Keret in a saloon and they're passing a napkin back and forth, riffing, pens blazing. That." ~ Kathy Fish, author of Together We Can Bury It __________________________________________________ “Like one of his characters, a cop named Jack, Gager is ‘the maestro of an out of time orchestra,’ and his stories arrest us with their reassuring unpredictability, their devoted irreverence, and their tragicomic grasp of the absurd. Birth, family, romance, work, grief, hilarity, fear, joy, and mortality all tumble together until their colors run. These brief stories will have you thinking — even if you're unsure of what — and leave you dazzled, recharged, and ready for damn near anything.” ~ Richard Hoffman ________________________________________________________ “Every Day There is Something About Elephants bristles with the energy of a keen and curious mind. Timothy Gager is a virtuoso of the compressed narrative. Each of these fictions sticks like a 10.” ~ Christopher Allen, author of Other Household Toxins
161 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 13, 2018
3 people are currently reading
10 people want to read
About the author
Timothy Gager
25 books87 followersBestselling Author, Timothy Gager has published 20 books of fiction and poetry, which includes his fourth novel, Shadows of the Seen, and his most recent book of poetry, Almost Bluing for X-Tra Whiteness. He hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, MA from 2001 to 2018, and started a weekly virtual series in 2020. He has had over 1000 works of fiction and poetry published, 19 nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work also has been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award, The Best of the Web, The Best Small Fictions Anthology and has been read on National Public Radio.
In 2023, Big Table Publishing published an anthology of twenty years of his selected work, with 175 pages of new material: The Best of Timothy Gager.
Timothy is the former Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review, and the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review. He also co-hosts the podcast, "the 2 deans: Dating, Dread and Disasters." A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts,and is employed as a social worker.
In 2023, Big Table Publishing published an anthology of twenty years of his selected work, with 175 pages of new material: The Best of Timothy Gager.
Timothy is the former Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review, and the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review. A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts,and is employed as a social worker.
In 2023, Big Table Publishing published an anthology of twenty years of his selected work, with 175 pages of new material: The Best of Timothy Gager.
Timothy is the former Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review, and the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review. He also co-hosts the podcast, "the 2 deans: Dating, Dread and Disasters." A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts,and is employed as a social worker.
In 2023, Big Table Publishing published an anthology of twenty years of his selected work, with 175 pages of new material: The Best of Timothy Gager.
Timothy is the former Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review, and the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review. A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts,and is employed as a social worker.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 24, 2018
Timothy Gager’s engaging new collection of flash fiction, Every Day There Is Something about Elephants, shows a novelist’s interest in human interactions and vivid details coupled with a poet’s gifts for compression and figurative language. The book’s 107 stories vary in tone, scope, and length, but none is longer than four pages. Some—such as “The Lottery Winner,” a tour de force at just a page in a half—deploy and develop an extraordinary number of characters relative to their size, while others navigate the constraints on their length by more poetic means, turning on a single pun (“Chiller”) or extended metaphor (“How penguins break”). The reader is carried along by their expert pacing and, in many cases, by their sheer shock value—Gager is a master of the twist ending.
The subject matter of these short-shorts is often harrowing, and the author is unafraid to write with sympathy, if not approval, of the seedier sides of human nature and society. Abused or addicted, homicidal or lecherous, his characters command our attention as they grope through their flawed lives toward connection or transcendence. Gager is frugal with his imagery, but he knows how to illuminate a character’s plight with a painful, well-chosen detail when the story calls for it:
You burned your lips on a crack pipe, without the warning: The glass on this pipe reaches extreme temperatures. Handle with care. You didn’t care. The blisters popped and fused your lips together.
The gritty realism of that terrible last sentence might seem at first glance to be at odds with another strain that runs through Gager’s work: a domestic surrealism that at times borders on whimsy. The elephant-haunted narrator of the collection’s title story recounts details that at first seem merely absurd (“How did I know an elephant had been in the refrigerator? He left his footprint in the cheesecake”) but become more disquieting as the narrative progresses, until we realize that the “elephants” are manifestations of the character’s mental disturbance. The conclusion brings the elephant metaphor to chilling culmination and unsettles the reader with all that it leaves unsaid. The story recalls Ernest Hemingway’s famous “Hills like White Elephants,” another piece of short fiction animated by its pachydermal symbolism, though the judicious silences in Gager’s narrative threaten to make Hemingway’s measured withholding of information look like a parlor trick.
If the familiar concerns of Gager’s fiction—domestic violence, firearms, and drinking among them—recur frequently in these stories, they never feel repetitive; Gager’s imaginative resources are considerable, and imbue each piece with its own freshness of character or circumstance. They are stories that, however grim on the surface, rejoice in their own brevity and technique. This immensely readable book affirms the prolific Gager’s literary gifts, and showcases a kind of short story that seems, by the collection’s end, entirely his own.
The subject matter of these short-shorts is often harrowing, and the author is unafraid to write with sympathy, if not approval, of the seedier sides of human nature and society. Abused or addicted, homicidal or lecherous, his characters command our attention as they grope through their flawed lives toward connection or transcendence. Gager is frugal with his imagery, but he knows how to illuminate a character’s plight with a painful, well-chosen detail when the story calls for it:
You burned your lips on a crack pipe, without the warning: The glass on this pipe reaches extreme temperatures. Handle with care. You didn’t care. The blisters popped and fused your lips together.
The gritty realism of that terrible last sentence might seem at first glance to be at odds with another strain that runs through Gager’s work: a domestic surrealism that at times borders on whimsy. The elephant-haunted narrator of the collection’s title story recounts details that at first seem merely absurd (“How did I know an elephant had been in the refrigerator? He left his footprint in the cheesecake”) but become more disquieting as the narrative progresses, until we realize that the “elephants” are manifestations of the character’s mental disturbance. The conclusion brings the elephant metaphor to chilling culmination and unsettles the reader with all that it leaves unsaid. The story recalls Ernest Hemingway’s famous “Hills like White Elephants,” another piece of short fiction animated by its pachydermal symbolism, though the judicious silences in Gager’s narrative threaten to make Hemingway’s measured withholding of information look like a parlor trick.
If the familiar concerns of Gager’s fiction—domestic violence, firearms, and drinking among them—recur frequently in these stories, they never feel repetitive; Gager’s imaginative resources are considerable, and imbue each piece with its own freshness of character or circumstance. They are stories that, however grim on the surface, rejoice in their own brevity and technique. This immensely readable book affirms the prolific Gager’s literary gifts, and showcases a kind of short story that seems, by the collection’s end, entirely his own.
June 20, 2018
I love the way this collection immerses us in revelatory episodes or situations from a range of lives. All the stories, even the more surreal ones, capture truths about human experience, with all its darkness, absurdity, and moments of recognition.
For my full review of the book, see http://smallpresspicks.com/every-day-....
For my full review of the book, see http://smallpresspicks.com/every-day-....
April 26, 2018
Gager writes distinctive flash. There’s a great deal of variety in here, all imaginative and full-bodied in a short space, but it all has a certain voice to it. That’s a good thing, because it’s a marvelous approach to flash. You won’t get it elsewhere, and you will want to get it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews