Ambushing the Void
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Author: James McAdams
Price: TBD (pbk.); TBD (ebook) ISBNs: 9781642510232 (pbk.); 9781642510249 (ebook) Physical description: 5.5x8.5; ~150 p. Publication date: Spring, 2020 Forthcoming |
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Fake reviews on Amazon. Punk rock angels. YouTube memorials. Anarchists, misfits, immigrants, addicts, juvenile detention communes. Religious testimonies via web cam, the nature of digital obituaries, depression salesmen. Ambushing the Void explores the margins of 21st century America, presenting characters confronting new worlds, new technologies, and new social structures while attempting to retain their identities and formative worldviews. Despite the impersonal technological and corporate apparatus of the contemporary world, they strive to re-imagine and discover how empathy, connection, relationships, and meaning can be found in our increasingly mechanized and atomized culture. These quirky, off-beat stories (with a tinge of the weird and disturbing) are thought-provoking takes on the post-modern search for meaning.
James McAdams grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and currently resides in St. Petersburg, FL, where he teaches English at the University of South Florida, Ringling College of Art+Design, and Keep St. Pete Lit. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Lehigh University. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in over forty venues, including Amazon/Day One, Bending Genres, Superstition Review, and B.O.A.T.T. Press. He is Flash Fiction editor of Barren Magazine and is working on a novel-in-flash about the opioid epidemic. Ambushing the Void, forthcoming from Frayed Edge Press, is his first book. Ominem unius libri timeo.
What advance readers are saying:
"Ambushing the Void is, like every great book, tender and merciless in its explorations of the human arrangement. The stories here are about love and addiction, which might as well be the same thing in most cases—compulsions that make us suffer and thereby feel more alive. McAdams writes from inside those compulsions, never flinching at the ruin they engender. Even as his characters lie to themselves, he forces us to face the truth. I tore through these tales and didn’t want to look back at them, but I did. You will, too.”
Steve Almond, author of God Bless America & Other Stories
"James McAdam’s debut collection rivets and unravels, moving beyond 'genre' and into the liminal zones between language and consciousness: the taut here/there friction of becoming. In these stories, performance deconstructs—each mediated piece of everyday life held up for readers to reconfigure. It’s not enough to say Ambushing the Void is a page-turner, more than the expectation of nominal (and normative) progression, McAdam’s prose will make you stop: abrupt, arresting, relentless."
Chris Campanioni, author of A and B and Also Nothing and the Internet is for real
"These stories are compassionate, timely, and full of the strangeness of life. They feature vulnerable people trying and trying again to connect in this dangerous world. Read this book!"
Stephanie Powell Watts, authorWe Are Taking Only What We Need and No One is Coming to Save Us
"Ambushing the Void is, like every great book, tender and merciless in its explorations of the human arrangement. The stories here are about love and addiction, which might as well be the same thing in most cases—compulsions that make us suffer and thereby feel more alive. McAdams writes from inside those compulsions, never flinching at the ruin they engender. Even as his characters lie to themselves, he forces us to face the truth. I tore through these tales and didn’t want to look back at them, but I did. You will, too.”
Steve Almond, author of God Bless America & Other Stories
"James McAdam’s debut collection rivets and unravels, moving beyond 'genre' and into the liminal zones between language and consciousness: the taut here/there friction of becoming. In these stories, performance deconstructs—each mediated piece of everyday life held up for readers to reconfigure. It’s not enough to say Ambushing the Void is a page-turner, more than the expectation of nominal (and normative) progression, McAdam’s prose will make you stop: abrupt, arresting, relentless."
Chris Campanioni, author of A and B and Also Nothing and the Internet is for real
"These stories are compassionate, timely, and full of the strangeness of life. They feature vulnerable people trying and trying again to connect in this dangerous world. Read this book!"
Stephanie Powell Watts, authorWe Are Taking Only What We Need and No One is Coming to Save Us