Synopses & Reviews
"If fiction is a fabrication, then realistic fiction might simply be the best told lies", says author Ron Block. The title story of The Dirty Shame Hotel is loosely based on a man the author interviewed who ran "the most organized junk yard I have ever seen, "and who had constructed an elaborate theory of the universe based on the principle of suction. "The Gothenburg Marching Band" details the adventures of a high school band traveling through nearly vacant Great Plains towns. "Bonehead" gives us a glimpse into life inside a clown ministry. And "Zadoc Xenophone" is a fictional retelling of the life of the author's great-aunt who worked at a pioneer telephone company. Both fanciful and grim, the stories in The Dirty Shame Hotel twine together outlandish imagination and lived experience. Block says of his writing: "Imagination allows me to experience something necessary that is beyond my experience. My writing is composed of strands of outlandish imagination, whimsy if you will. Writing engenders a sympathetic imagination, which is redemptive, no matter how the story turns out".
Synopsis
A man witnesses the aftermath of animal slaughter while taking his daughter pumpkin-picking on a farm; two men plot the death of a Hank Williams wannabe; a lonely young man develops roundworm from exposure to old books - these are some of the stories in Ron Block's original and hilarious debut collection of stories. Block has a fierce range as a writer, the stories riding the spectrum from quiet poignancy to the bizarre and raucous. THE DIRTY SHAME HOTEL is a darkly comic, unflinching, and unsettling account of the lives of the disenfranchised. - Laurie Foos, author of EX UTERO. Ron Block is a writer with nerve and verve, a high wire artist whose stunning leaps of fancy balance us on the thin edge where the fantastic and the ordinary meet. - Lee Martin, author of THE LEAST YOU KNEED TO KNOW.
Synopsis
Quirky characters of the Great Plains.