false 2896953 0 0 www.greggerke.com]]> male 1974/08/22 791920 6394359 1935402226 9781935402220 2 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6394359-there-s-something-wrong-with-sven 4.40 5
In Greg Gerke's debut collection, flash fiction illuminates some of the same eccentricites of small town, middle American experience that Sherwood Anderson explored in his classic early 20th century story collections Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Triumph of the Egg (1921). Like Anderson, Gerke reveals the core of strangeness underlying familiar societal conventions as grotesque, and depicts his 21st century "grotesques" as intimately familiar.

Packing 54 "flash" narratives into a scant 144 pages, Gerke takes readers on a picaresque gambol through many of the leading tropes of contemporary American storytelling from the manic to the gothic, absurdist romance to mock epic parody, Rashomon-effect reverie to tavern patron's tall tale.
- R.D. Pohl -Buffalo News

Full of twists and turns, Greg Gerke’s debut collection is more powerful than fun; each character has flavor, the situations stick, the work is unique. There’s Something Wrong with Sven, but this book is right on.
—Kim Chinquee, Pushcart Winner and author of Oh Baby

With an ever-roving eye for the peculiar episodic at home and abroad, Greg Gerke lets plenty of little thrills bound out from these stories—though don’t look past the more tender moments in his carnivalesque travels. They are just as humorous as they are oddly endearing.
—Forrest Roth, author of Line and Pause

In There's Something Wrong With Sven, Greg Gerke delivers dozens of short-shorts, each an absurdist world full of compassion and ambition, populated by surprisingly earnest characters who cannot help but enchant us as they pursue goals that are simultaneously fleeting and eternal. These stories contain big hearts and big laughter, as well as just enough of the sad and the weird to be both believable and memorable.
—Matt Bell, author of The Collectors and How the Broken Lead the Blind

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