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The Awful Possibilities |
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Wednesday, 27 January 2010 |
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Here are nice words:
STARRED REVIEW "Nine caustic stories by TeBordo find screeching ironies in rhetorical absurdities and writerly subversiveness. Bizarre and biting, these tales leave a mark." —Publishers Weekly
"The nine stories of TeBordo’s first collection are ambiguous and creepy. A dire surrealism roils beneath their superficial naturalism. Sheer delight for connoisseurs of nongenre strangeness."—Booklist
"Christian TeBordo shows that it is possible to be, simultaneously, a wise old soul and a crazed young terror." —George Saunders
"The Awful Possibilities of Christian TeBordo put me in mind of Quentin Tarantino on short story juice. The violence and depravity ride the surface, where I like them, and the heart is a lyrical heart. Add to that creepy postcards with cryptic messages and this collection attacks from all sides." —Jeff Parker, Author of Ovenman
"I would say, take a bit of Alan DeNiro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, mix it with Tarantino and a dash of a scientist with a lab full of words and you might make it close to the stories that inhabit TeBordo’s awe-ful world."—Ryan W. Bradley, The Big Other
"Throughout The Awful Possibilities, TeBordo plays with subtle time and point of view shifts that bring out a surprising depth to what could be, at first glance, sensationalistic or exploitative themes. Where tables are turned, where prisoners become keepers, where memories are real, imagined, or continuously reconditioned into new realities."—Dell Smith, Unreliable Narrator "TeBordo is clever, and his cleverness, above all, tells him that communication is impossible except as something erratic, scatter-shot." –Spencer Dew, decomP
"We are pushed out of these stories, we are kept at bay, we are thrust into their own miscommunications, we are turned back and on our backs, we are shipped away in fragments. This is a book that you need to read with your own eyes."—J.A. Tyler, elimae
"Readers looking for answers will find this collection lacking. There are no morals here, only possibilities."— TriQuarterly
""To read The Awful Possibilities is to be shaken by the collar and commanded to recognize TeBordo’s bravery, because these stories ardently inhabit the thrilling, hazy space between high art and bullshit."—Stockyard Magazine "Why, for example, does “The Champion of Forgetting” start where it starts and end where it ends?" (Why indeed?) –Publish Chicago
"…the love child of Samuel Beckett and Dorothy Parker." —Jerome Ludwig, the Chicago Reader
| The Awful Possibilities
By Christian TeBordo
"Quentin Tarantino on short story juice. The violence and depravity ride the surface, where I like them, and the heart is a lyrical heart. Add to that creepy postcards with cryptic messages and this collection attacks from all sides." —Jeff Parker, Author of Ovenman April 2010! A girl masters the art of forgetting among kidney thieves. A motivational speaker skins his best friend to impress his wife. A man outlines the rules and regulations for sadistic childrearing. You’ve heard these people whispering in hallways, mumbling in diners, shouting in the apartment next door. In brilliantly strange set pieces that explode the boundaries of short fiction, Christian TeBordo locates the awe in the awful possibilities we could never have imagined. Christian TeBordo has published three novels. This is his first collection of short fiction. He lives in Philadelphia. Read his blog at awfulpossibilities.com | |
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