Malaprop’s gives nod to new book of stories

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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Charlotte.com has it:

Raleigh’s John Kessel is known as a science fiction author, winner of several sci-fi and fantasy awards, including the prestigious Nebula.

But that’s too tight-fitting a label to describe the writer of the dark, wacky, wide-ranging short stories that make up his new collection, “The Baum Plan for Financial Independence,” ($24 hardcover, $16 paperback, Small Beer Press. You can also download it free at www.lcrw.net.)

In “Every Angel Is Terrifying,” Kessel tells a Southern gothic tale that imagines what happens after Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” concludes. In “Pride and Prometheus,” he introduces Jane Austen’s Mary Bennet to Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein.

“The Red Phone” offers a bizarre, hilarious phone sex conversation. And in the book’s title story, two low-lifes, Sid and Dot, unexpectedly find Oz. Boy, is it nice.

“This is one of those too rare short story collections that you can recommend with confidence to both the literary snob and the hard-core computer geek,” Rich Rennicks of Asheville’s Malaprop’s Bookstore wrote recently, nominating the collection as a Book Sense pick.