Climate Strange

Description:

A hiker stumbles upon a secret waterfall in the woods. A desperate father tries to get his family to enjoy a game of Jenga. A housecleaning robot goes berserk. Miss Senior Massachusetts dances with an elephant. A clown cult comes to town. Dogs walk their owners. Everyone gets a popcorn machine. Cancer is cured by mistake. A sasquatch attempts to jump a canyon on a motorcycle. A neighbor blasts the ionosphere from his yard. Climate Strange is a cracked funhouse mirror with the shards fallen and reflecting all of the crazy wonders of the new now.

Advanced Praise:

 Climate Strange, a collaborative collection of fiction, guides us into snapshots—glimpses of a world full of frontiers. These stories feel like taking a walk in a neighborhood and  looking through the windows of each house as we stroll by, witnessing the bizarre grounded in reality. Lynchian at times, maybe Bradburyian, but with its own distinctive tones and narratives…Bosworth and Ridge write with pinpoint mastery—revealing the true nature and purpose of literature…—Shome Dasgupta, author of Cajun South Brown Folk

Climate Strange  is a party, and your friends are there. These brief lucid pieces bring to mind Lydia Davis and Karl Ove Knausgård mingling on the set of a new western filmed in the Mall of America, except in Norway—now a country run by an Oulipo government. The point: get there quick.—Nora Lange, author of Us Fools and Day Care

Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth have produced the most perfect weird book. Are these dreams? Fantasias? Postcards from a parallel universe? It doesn’t matter, because they’re so absorbing and funny and sad and good they deserve to just exist without category, to be read without anything but delight.—Amber Sparks,  author of Happy People Don’t Live Here

It seems like every week nowadays is a weird week, but not good weird. These pieces are good weird—eccentric and surreal and ready to turn on a dime or even on a penny, funny and insane, but with a deep and sometimes grim human core.—Brian Evenson, World Fantasy Award and Shirley Jackson Award winner

Climate Strange is another wild, powerful duet album from Ridge and Bosworth, two flash fiction American masters. Each story howls with life and laughter…With echoes of James Tate, Donald Barthelme, and Italo Calvino, Climate Strange  rises to the occasion of our strange times and leaves the reader breathlessly alive…—Michael Bible author of Sophia and The Terrible