Weird Weeks

by Mel Bosworth (co-author), Ryan Ridge (co-author)

The cats have demands and our hands have become bricks. The fighter pilots always occupy the sky. Our brothers gather up sentimental baseball bats and gift us with the beatings of our lives in broad daylight. These are strange days. These are Weird Weeks. In this microcollection of microfictions, Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth hold that we can carry through each humdinger of a day—slapstick and sour in turn—no matter the ridiculousness of our muster.

Advance Praise:

“It seems like every week nowadays is a weird week, but not good weird. These pieces are good weird—eccentric and surreal and ready to turn on a dime or even on a penny, funny and insane, but with a deep and sometimes grim human core.”

—Brian Evenson author of A Collapse of Horses

"Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth have produced the most perfect weird book in Weird Weeks. Are these dreams? Fantasias? Postcards from a parallel universe? It doesn’t matter, because they’re so absorbing and funny and sad and good they deserve to just exist without category, to be read without anything but delight.”

—Amber Sparks author of The Unfinished World

“Weird Weeks is another wild powerful duet album from Ridge and Bosworth, two flash fiction American masters. Each story howls with life and laughter. A sucker punch right to the heart. With echoes of James Tate, Donald Barthelme, and Italo Calvino, Weird Weeks rises to the occasion of our strange times and leaves the reader breathlessly alive. A full-tilt joyride for the soul, wonderfully weird and dangerously beautiful.”

—Michael Bible author of Sophia and Empire of Light

Genres: Fiction

76 pages, Paperback

Published November 16, 2018

About the author

Mel Bosworth is the author of the novel Freight and co-author with Ryan Ridge of the short fiction collection Second Acts in American Lives. His work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Tin House, Per Contra, New World Writing, Santa Monica Review, Melville House, American Book Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Western Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfectly packaged, the stories that make up weird weeks are indeed wonderfully, gloriously, weird. I loved the hell out of this tiny thing.

[Ryan Ridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cowrote this one with Mel B but nonetheless I like it a lot.

[Mel Bosworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a biased co-author but I think it's awesome.

[Kent Winward · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thing about weird things is sometimes you understand the weird and sometimes you don't, but even in today's weird times, Bosworth and Ridge manage some uniquely weird.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly fantastic. Absurd, yes, funny, yes, inventive, completely. And also lovely. And also precise, compressed, restrained. And also sincere. These tiny microfictions were a sheer delight.

[Christy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful little book, inside and out. Hilarious and gut punching at the same time. Another fab collaboration from Bosworth and Ridge.

[Allison Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this tiny little book. My strange mind loved the rigidity of stories laid out as happening day by day even though the time was more abstract than linear.