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Other characters jump from the pages as well, including a Vietnam vet, now a doorman, who finds himself transported back to the war whenever it rains, shooting wildly at passing cars with his umbrella as he escorts residents to and from their apartment building. In a postmodern examination of the writing process itself, Brodsky chronicles the rise of another intriguing individual – a sous-chef who begins his career at a fowl facility, rendering chicken parts into words, and eventually becomes the toast of Manhattan for transforming gizzards into Petrarchan sonnets, necks into short stories.
These unique protagonists, and the others in this volume’s forty-two fast-paced fictions, lead the reader through a house of mirrors in which everyday reality is twisted in ways magically satirical and absurdly surreal. Their distorted reflections, which become strikingly familiar to us as we recognize our own afflictions and foibles in them, hover in the subconscious long after This Here’s a Merica is closed.
About the Author:
L.D. Brodsky was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1941, where he attended St. Louis Country Day School. After earning a B.A., magna cum laude, at Yale University in 1963, he received an M.A. in English from Washington University in 1967 and an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University the following year.
Brodsky is the author of thirty-seven volumes of poetry (five of which have been published in French by Editions Gallimard), nine books of scholarship on William Faulkner, and three books of short fictions. His poems and essays have appeared in Harper’s, The Faulkner Review, Southern Review, Texas Quarterly, National Forum, American Scholar, Studies in Bibliography, Kansas Quarterly, Ball State University’s Forum, Cimarron Review, and Literary Review, as well as in Ariel, Acumen, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Dalhousie Review, and other journals. His work has also been printed in five editions of the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry.
Strap yourself in – it’s a bumpy ride through Brodsky’s carnivaled imagination, one that will jolt you into acute self-awareness with its bold language and provocative characters, who dare you to come further inside and examine "a Merica" through their fun-house mirrors.
Overview