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Penelope Variations
The query that failed to attract attention from publishers and agents ran as follows for this sad little
Penelope Variations is a 76,000-word short story collection about alcoholism and mental illness. The narrator, Charlie, links the stories, many of which are about botched relationships that serve as points along the map of his dysfunction. The stories take you through his drinking years, and his attempts at sobriety. The book doesn’t tell an entirely hopeful story, with Charlie, in the end, finding sobriety but also a hard-nosed fatalism, where he submits to life even when it seems hopeless.
The book opens with a series of stories told by and about a character named Sweeper, who, we later find out, is Charlie’s creation, and Sweeper’s sensational stories are a means for Charlie to process his psychotic episode. It foretells a situation of loneliness and isolation, as well as the beginning of a struggle to find normalcy. Charlie enters the book as he resurfaces among old friends, who don’t seem to treat him the same or recognize him. He finds comfort and magic in the bottle, as though this were his anodyne. What follows is a series of stories involving failed relationships, beginning with a love of alcohol and ending with a sense of being outside of life, as though just observing while tracing a trajectory that in retrospect seems to have been mapped out before. There is also one section that involves a return to Sweeper, with Charlie telling a somewhat hard-boiled story about finding a connection with this strange character through a narrator digging through fragments of Sweeper’s writing.
I am a retail clerk with the liberal arts major blues. After graduating UMass Boston with a degree in Philosophy and English, after climbing out of my own personal bottle six years ago, I find myself stuck behind a register. However, this has given me time to write some books, with this one being the most complete. Two of the stories have been published in literary journals, one in The Avalon Literary Review, and another in The Rag. I understand that this isn’t a very accomplished resume, and that I am searching blindly for representation. However, I do feel I have something truly worthwhile here, and believe people will sense the realness of these stories, which really run the gamut between classy and filthy, sad and humorous, and tell of the everyday madness and the high drama of mental illness.
Penelope Variations is a 76,000-word short story collection about alcoholism and mental illness. The narrator, Charlie, links the stories, many of which are about botched relationships that serve as points along the map of his dysfunction. The stories take you through his drinking years, and his attempts at sobriety. The book doesn’t tell an entirely hopeful story, with Charlie, in the end, finding sobriety but also a hard-nosed fatalism, where he submits to life even when it seems hopeless.
The book opens with a series of stories told by and about a character named Sweeper, who, we later find out, is Charlie’s creation, and Sweeper’s sensational stories are a means for Charlie to process his psychotic episode. It foretells a situation of loneliness and isolation, as well as the beginning of a struggle to find normalcy. Charlie enters the book as he resurfaces among old friends, who don’t seem to treat him the same or recognize him. He finds comfort and magic in the bottle, as though this were his anodyne. What follows is a series of stories involving failed relationships, beginning with a love of alcohol and ending with a sense of being outside of life, as though just observing while tracing a trajectory that in retrospect seems to have been mapped out before. There is also one section that involves a return to Sweeper, with Charlie telling a somewhat hard-boiled story about finding a connection with this strange character through a narrator digging through fragments of Sweeper’s writing.
I am a retail clerk with the liberal arts major blues. After graduating UMass Boston with a degree in Philosophy and English, after climbing out of my own personal bottle six years ago, I find myself stuck behind a register. However, this has given me time to write some books, with this one being the most complete. Two of the stories have been published in literary journals, one in The Avalon Literary Review, and another in The Rag. I understand that this isn’t a very accomplished resume, and that I am searching blindly for representation. However, I do feel I have something truly worthwhile here, and believe people will sense the realness of these stories, which really run the gamut between classy and filthy, sad and humorous, and tell of the everyday madness and the high drama of mental illness.
315 pages, Paperback
Published January 19, 2018
1 person want to read
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