Phantoms

My friend Rebecca King and her latest venture, Origami Zoo Press, are going to be releasing a chapbook of flash fictions and short-short stories by yours truly. It's called Phantoms, and it's available for pre-order now.*

Here's the cover:

Here's a little marketing copy:

The characters in Chad Simpson's Phantoms are lost and struggling but constantly in motion -- a brother upright after being run over by his own car, a retired father-in-law falling slowly off the grid, a young woman on a Midwestern bar stoop plotting a trip to Tunisia, a lonely sales rep whose mouth sags even when she smiles. In sixteen meticulously crafted short pieces, Simpson creates scenes covering vast emotional terrain where these characters emerge, imperfect and unfinished. In gestures large and small, kind and cruel, they push and pull at the fates laid out for them, constantly chasing the other versions of themselves they know will never quite become real.

Here's a blurb:

“I want to say impossible things about Chad Simpson's sentences: how, via discipline, they arrive at grace. How they serve as clean lineaments of experience. How they hum with the mystery they conduct. I want to say simple things about Chad Simpson's fictions: read them. Right this second. They're so well made and told.”
—Scott Garson, author of American Gymnopédies

And another:

"Chad Simpson's stories claim borders wider than their page counts might suggest, doubled as they are by the ghosts that flicker between their sentences. It is these ghosts that Simpson asks us to reckon with, and it is his characters’ attempts to chain or banish these specters--with memory, with miracle, with mathematics--that ultimately ties us to their lives, so that they might haunt us far beyond these intricately-inked pages."
—Matt Bell, author of How They Were Found

You can read sample stories here and here.

That's the end of my pimping this thing, at least for now.

*I think I've written about pre-ordering books before, but in case you forgot what I had to say: I love pre-ordering books. This thing is going to drop on April 16th, but if you order it now, then you'll forget all about it by then--unless you pay much attention to your credit or debit card statement. And then, sometime in mid-April, not long after you've filed your taxes, when you're waiting for all this stinking snow to finally melt, this cool little chapbook arrives in your mailbox like magic. I think I have three or four books that are going to be surprising me in just this way over the next few months, but, like I said, I'm not really thinking about them for now.