"Stephen Beachy is a visionary. In these twin novellas, he explores madness and crime with the nocturnal lyricism of empty time and space. Beachy's dear criminals reach an exquisite isolation and so does his reader, a non place where categories collapse, like freedom and confinement, chaos and lucidity, the angelic and demonic. A harsh dream, and we will never wake." - Robert Glück
In Some Phantom a woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing an abusive relationship. She gets a job teaching disturbed children, explores the city, fears her old life catching up with her. She must decide whether her increasing paranoia is a form of psychosis--or a new lucidity. A bastard offspring of The Turn of the Screw and Carnival of Souls, it roams the border territory between memory and insanity, fantasy and violence.
In No Time Flat, Wade grows up in isolation on the American plains, living mostly in his dreams. Caught between the silences of his elderly parents and the permutations of his own fantasies, his childhood seems to last forever. Haunted by strange encounters and a shooting at his school, he finally escapes and becomes nomadic, wandering across desolate landscapes marked by fleeting connections and unfathomable crimes.
About the Author :
Stephen Beachy is the author of the novels Glory Hole, boneyard, The Whistling Song, and Distortion, the twin novellas Some Phantom and No Time Flat, and the Amish sci-fi series that begins with Zeke Yoder vs. the Singularity. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Evergreen Review, BOMB, The Chicago Review, New York magazine, and elsewhere. He is the prose editor of the journal Your Impossible Voice, teaches at the University of San Francisco, and lives in San Diego.
Review :
"Not since Halldór Laxness have I been so simply surprised by the glamour and skill and darkness of another writer's art . . . Writer to writer, I thank Stephen Beachy. This is how we live." - Eileen Myles
"Emotional states--loneliness, terror, longing for escape--get blown across these bleak scenes and become entangled, the way the second of the two novellas slips out of the first, like a growth, and turns into something totally unexpected. - Alvin Lu
"Creepy, desolate, and rich." - Stacey Levine
"Henry Miller said that the moment you have an original thought, you cease to be an American. These 'fissures in the architecture of the Dreamtime' are great unAmerican novellas." - Thorn Kief Hillsbery
