Misplaced Alice

by Matt Briggs

I was highly invigorated by these stories. They're such exquisitely crafted apercus of the droll and the macabre. Very Hitchockian. The focus of the stories becomes very acute; the severe compression causes grotesque acts to appear even more grotesque.

In this new collection of stories, Matt Briggs reminds us of the ordinary strangeness of strange and ordinary lives. Like the best in contemporary literature, his stories make the familiar unfamiliar and thus remind us to take a second look at who we are. Briggs understands the two-sidedness of life, how many ordinary situations can be comforting and disturbing at the same time. Sometimes he puts me in mind of Raymond Carver's stories. Other times he reminds me of the off-kilter world of Russell Edson. This is a striking new collection, one that should draw the attention of everyone who is interested in what is happening in contemporary short fiction.


About the Author

Matt Briggs is the author of a previous collection of stories, The Remains of River Names. His stories and essays have appeared in The Rendezvous Reader, Split: Stories from a Generation Raised on Divorce, The Raven Chronicles, and ZYZZYVA. He lives in Seattle.

116 pages

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Matt Briggs grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley, raised by working-class, counter-culture parents who cultivated and sold cannabis. Briggs has written two books set in rural Washington chronicling this life, The Remains of River Names and Shoot the Buffalo. Critic Ann Powers wrote of Briggs first book in the New York Times Book Review, "Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out." Briggs has published a number of collection of stories, including The Moss Gatherers and The End is the Beginning. Of his stories, Jim Feast wrote in the American Book Review, "All of Briggs’s zigzagging stories are told with great attention to the details of lowbrow culture and the contours of the American Northwest."

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this years ago. Why did I forget to add it to my book list? Why was it misplaced among my book-reading memories? Certainly not because I didn't like it? It's a wonderful collection of short stories. Many of them very tiny.

Is it Matt's fault, maybe? Did he somehow CAUSE this to happen? Did he embed within the stories in the book some sort of CODE? Did the code WORK ON ME in some way?

Am I hypnotized? Should I continue to trust myself? Maybe not, Goodreads. Maybe not.

Read this book. Tell me if it WORKS on YOU, as well. We'll compare notes.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of interesting short stories...there was only one I could absolutely not read.