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The Exploding Elephant
A conniving drifter flees from one lot of trouble - ripping off a Berlin policewoman - to another, when he winds up in the small Silesian city his Polish grandmother avoided, partly because of its bad vibe: Gliwice.
In Gliwice, he finds some gainful employment as an inept teacher of English. The ungainful employment he takes up with some Russian chancers is not much better for his soul or pocket. He also has a dalliance with a controlling, clingy young woman, while falling in love with her more cultured friend, who just happens to own a priceless violin.
On the face of it, he seems to be lucky to have landed a rent-free flat in the building he believes was once the ballet school. The ghosts who haunt him there, and frighten his guests, certainly seem to have a benign presence. However, the building may once have had a more sinister purpose, and its current residents certainly seem to have other ideas for the plans he is making.
The Exploding Elephant is a 19000-word comic novelette. I lived in Gliwice, and knew some of the people in the story, and I think it's safe to say that there's a lot of me in it (rescued by fiction, thankfully.)
It can be found here, for $0.99 in various formats:
https://books2read.com/b/m2vZv1
In Gliwice, he finds some gainful employment as an inept teacher of English. The ungainful employment he takes up with some Russian chancers is not much better for his soul or pocket. He also has a dalliance with a controlling, clingy young woman, while falling in love with her more cultured friend, who just happens to own a priceless violin.
On the face of it, he seems to be lucky to have landed a rent-free flat in the building he believes was once the ballet school. The ghosts who haunt him there, and frighten his guests, certainly seem to have a benign presence. However, the building may once have had a more sinister purpose, and its current residents certainly seem to have other ideas for the plans he is making.
The Exploding Elephant is a 19000-word comic novelette. I lived in Gliwice, and knew some of the people in the story, and I think it's safe to say that there's a lot of me in it (rescued by fiction, thankfully.)
It can be found here, for $0.99 in various formats:
https://books2read.com/b/m2vZv1
100 pages, ebook
First published June 16, 2018
1 person want to read
About the author
Nick Sweeney
16 books30 followersI'm a writer of fiction, mainly, and have published lots of short stories, many of them finding a home in print and all over the web.
I also write novels and novellas, and my latest one is called The Fortune Teller's Factotum. It looks at an intense and unlikely friendship between two young women that reveals dark secrets about their families. It was published in October 2023 by Hear Our Voice LLC, a new US publisher.
2022's Cleopatra's Script is the longest book I have written, at 160000 words. It was published by Golden Storyline Books. Set in Rome in the mid-1990s, it tells the story of how a couple's romance is compromised by the diversion of the murder of a Gypsy child, and their knowledge of it.
My novelette The Émigré Engineer was published in October 2021 by Ploughshares, a chapbook publisher under the wing of Boston Mass. Emerson College. It's about a young man who dodges the flying bullets of the Russian Revolution to 'become an American' eventually, during the time of Prohibition, when there were plenty of bullets flying. It's available from here as a download, or in print as part of the Ploughshares Fall 2021 Omnibus.
My novella A Blue Coast Mystery, Almost Solved. came out in October 2020 with Addison and Highsmith, an imprint of Histria Books. It's set in London in the 1970s and on the French Riviera in the 1960s, among an expatriate community that often remains unseen, and is partly a story about people from places that no longer exist. You can see more about it here. It is available now from Amazon, using this link. You can also get it directly from Histria Books at this link.
In the summer of 2018, I had my then second-longest piece of work, The Exploding Elephant, published by Bards and Sages under its Society of Misfits outlet. Like much of my work, it is set in Poland, in this case in Gliwice, the town where I lived in 1993. It's a piece of speculative fiction centring on a young opportunist whose bad choices are gradually coming home to him. At around 20000 words, it's a 'novelette' - a bit shorter than a novella. It's currently out of print, and the rights have reverted to me so I'm looking into getting it republished in some other way.
My first novel was published in April 2011 by Unthank Books. It's called Laikonik Express, and follows two American slackers on a haunted jaunt around Poland in search of a woman one of them has met. The Laikonik Express is the name of the train taking them on their way, which runs from Krakow in the south, to Gdynia in the north, on the Baltic Sea. There are a few pages on this site devoted to various aspects of it.
I post links to my published short stories on my website The Last Thing the Author Said, or sometimes the stories themselves. I also post unpublished writing, some of it unpublishable maybe, and some of it just works-in-progress, or stasis, and will welcome comments, criticism, creative derision and crisps.
Be in touch - it's good to talk, apparently. Find me on Facebook, which is a either a complete waste of time or just a partial one. I can also be tweeted @nikone3na though I've not been partaking in Twitter very much recently. That's the same as my often neglected Instagram handle.
I also write novels and novellas, and my latest one is called The Fortune Teller's Factotum. It looks at an intense and unlikely friendship between two young women that reveals dark secrets about their families. It was published in October 2023 by Hear Our Voice LLC, a new US publisher.
2022's Cleopatra's Script is the longest book I have written, at 160000 words. It was published by Golden Storyline Books. Set in Rome in the mid-1990s, it tells the story of how a couple's romance is compromised by the diversion of the murder of a Gypsy child, and their knowledge of it.
My novelette The Émigré Engineer was published in October 2021 by Ploughshares, a chapbook publisher under the wing of Boston Mass. Emerson College. It's about a young man who dodges the flying bullets of the Russian Revolution to 'become an American' eventually, during the time of Prohibition, when there were plenty of bullets flying. It's available from here as a download, or in print as part of the Ploughshares Fall 2021 Omnibus.
My novella A Blue Coast Mystery, Almost Solved. came out in October 2020 with Addison and Highsmith, an imprint of Histria Books. It's set in London in the 1970s and on the French Riviera in the 1960s, among an expatriate community that often remains unseen, and is partly a story about people from places that no longer exist. You can see more about it here. It is available now from Amazon, using this link. You can also get it directly from Histria Books at this link.
In the summer of 2018, I had my then second-longest piece of work, The Exploding Elephant, published by Bards and Sages under its Society of Misfits outlet. Like much of my work, it is set in Poland, in this case in Gliwice, the town where I lived in 1993. It's a piece of speculative fiction centring on a young opportunist whose bad choices are gradually coming home to him. At around 20000 words, it's a 'novelette' - a bit shorter than a novella. It's currently out of print, and the rights have reverted to me so I'm looking into getting it republished in some other way.
My first novel was published in April 2011 by Unthank Books. It's called Laikonik Express, and follows two American slackers on a haunted jaunt around Poland in search of a woman one of them has met. The Laikonik Express is the name of the train taking them on their way, which runs from Krakow in the south, to Gdynia in the north, on the Baltic Sea. There are a few pages on this site devoted to various aspects of it.
I post links to my published short stories on my website The Last Thing the Author Said, or sometimes the stories themselves. I also post unpublished writing, some of it unpublishable maybe, and some of it just works-in-progress, or stasis, and will welcome comments, criticism, creative derision and crisps.
Be in touch - it's good to talk, apparently. Find me on Facebook, which is a either a complete waste of time or just a partial one. I can also be tweeted @nikone3na though I've not been partaking in Twitter very much recently. That's the same as my often neglected Instagram handle.
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