BRUTES - A book of short fiction by Bill Whitten of St. Johnny, Grand Mal & William Carlos Whitten

 

A book of short fiction called BRUTES written by Bill Whitten of St. Johnny, Grand Mal & William Carlos Whitten is out now on Too Big to Fail Press

Manuel Marrero (founder of Expat Press/author) extols BRUTES: "Bill Whitten's sentences enter you with painful clarity before you've realized what hit you. These are stories that were waiting to be written and eventually read. Whitten is a writer transcribing gravity. He lets you freefall to meet the moment on dyadic terms, that of the story's and the reader's emotional infrastructure. BRUTES is a cudgel working the midsection, a slow burner that incandesces effulgently and often, never letting you forget that you're on fire, where other books never let you forget you're reading them."

Mishka Shubaly calls BRUTES: “Savage and tender, elegant and depraved, caustic and yearning, Whitten’s prose is a bloody straight razor wrapped in a silk pocket square.”

Pick it up HERE

(And give it a review while your at it) 

....  from BRUTES:

  There was a pay-phone on W. 23rd Street. His friends told him about it, they all used it. You dropped a quarter in the slot, it fell through the machine and landed in the coin-return. Yet, miraculously the phone registered a credit. With one quarter - dropping again and again through the apparatus - a person was able to call anywhere in the world for free. Whenever such a pay-phone was discovered, its location was guarded with scrupulous care (like a secret imparted from father to son) and discreetly transmitted to select dishwashers, porters, janitors, grad-students, furniture movers, bike messengers. Often there would be a line of people waiting to use one of those singular telephones. The devices were proof that there was no uncultivated ground in the universe; nothing was truly barren or dead.

It was at the pay-phone on W. 23rd that Arnal last spoke to his grandmother in Zakynthos. The quarter must have fallen through the machine two hundred times. As his giagiá repeated the legend that a likeness of Christ had first been rendered by Pilate, her voice warped into arias of dense telephonic distortion. It had been an evening like so many others, pushed and pulled at by errant ripples of time. 

He’d been too poor to buy a plane ticket to attend her funeral. Since he’d been run over and remade into the person he was meant to be, he could, at last, afford to pay his respects to her. But there was no hurry. The past and future were connected in the same way ‘here’ was to ‘there’.  

#stjohnny

#grandmal