Phantasmagoria

"The stunning stories found in Thomas Cooper’s collection Phantasmagoria demonstrate the paradox of bounded boundless space. Miniature and domestic, rooms within rooms, these encapsulated landscapes open up as they boil down. Their evaporation before your eyes expands sublimely, proving that even in the most concentrated, suffocatingly contracted arenas, in the narrowest most focused field of focus, lurks an infinite number of points, and an endless endlessness that keeps going beyond gone. These are Pascalian maps to the stars and to the eternal terrifyingly distant distances between them."
--Michael Martone, author of Racing in Place and Michael Martone

"Thomas Cooper is a master of the short short story, reveling brilliantly in the challenges of its compression as he articulates rich and complex truths about the human condition, truths that his artistry convinces us can be precisely illuminated in no other form. Phantasmagoria is, to put it simply, one of the three or four finest collections of flash fiction I’ve ever read."
--Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain