Sex World

Description

Ron Koertge eagerly tries his talented hand at Flash Fiction. In "BFF," a teenage girl from the near-future orders friends from Amazon. A few pages later, a robot who travels what is left of the world and observes through "well-engineered eyes" claims that the sound of turbines is his lullaby. A fed-up daughter finds a foolproof way to do away with

Ron Koertge teaches at Hamline University in their low-residency MFA program for Children's Writing. His new book is Sex World, his first collection of short, short fiction. His recent books of poetry include Fever (Red Hen Press, 2007), Indigo (Red Hen Press, 2009), Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses (Candlewick Press, 2012), and The Ogre's Wife (Red Hen Press, 2013). Koertge also writes fiction for teenagers, including many novels and novels-in-verse: The Brimstone Journals, Stoner & Spaz, Strays, Shakespeare Bats Cleanup, Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs, and Coaltown Jesus. All were honored by the American Library Association, and two received PEN awards. He is the recipient of grants from the NEA and the California Arts Council and has poems in two volumes of Best American Poetry. He lives in South Pasadena, California.

"Sex World's brief, potent stories reveal a master satirist trafficking in dark desires, buried fears, black comedy, and the swirl of holy and unholy we all contain. Koertge chronicles secret hungers and vulnerabilities, acerbic tenderness, and the soul's wrestling match with what it wants versus what it needs and deserves." --Amy Gerstler, author of Dearest Creature "Ron Koertge walked into a bar. 'Read my stories, ' he said. 'They're good.' 'I don't have time, ' I said. I was wrong. He was right." --Pete Hautman, winner of the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize "In this remarkable collection of flash fiction, Ron Koertge proves that he's a master of the form. He teases out lyricism from the most mundane of words, and significance from the most mundane of situations." --Gene Yang, author of American Born Chinese "In the wildly imaginative flash fictions of Sex World, poet and young adult author extraordinaire, Ron Koertge, moves from humor to poignance, irreverence to tenderness, with a grace and deceptive ease that I hereby dub Koertgeesque (Koertgesian?), and wish I had invented myself. If you want bang for your literary buck, let it stop here." --Charles Harper Webb "Sex World is like a box of flashy gourmet chocolates: You can devour them in order or pluck them randomly, each one a deliciously formed morsel that will satisfy your taste for everything from Greek goddesses to robots and the great variety of humanity in between. You'll pay a price of course: after the bountiful bonbons are gone, you won't be satisfied; you'll want more and more and more..." --Fengar Gael