These are stories of hope amid the Zoloft and bar tabs that cushion our crumbling lives. |
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Perfect Bound | 63 pages |
With Charactered Pieces, Caleb J. Ross presents a varied world of familial discord, one where a dead fetus evokes more compassion than its mother (“Charactered Pieces”); where two brothers offer the destruction of a family legacy as a birthday gift for their aging father (“My Family’s Rule”); where one brother’s love of Holocaust documentaries pushes his family through the aftermath of his assumed suicide (“The Camp”). |
| Charactered Pieces peels away the superficial armor of public life to reveal the flaws beneath and treats those perceived weaknesses not as hidden sources of pain but as reasons to celebrate life. | |
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Praise “Evoking a novel by Chuck Palahniuk or a film by Darren Aronofsky, Charactered Pieces is a multifarious patchwork of despair. From the misshapen protagonist of the title story to the gruesome climax of “The Camel of Morocco,” this collection is among the most profound and disturbing artifacts of our time.” -Daniel Casebeer, editor of Pear Noir! |
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| “Ross claims that his characters are not drawn from real people and yet these stories—about a jewelry saleswoman with a fetal leg growing out of her belly, a man who drinks the blood of a dead camel, or a budding Holocaust documentarian who dies in a mysterious incident involving a coat hanger—sound eerily similar to my own life. Chances are you’ll find yourself in here, too. Wicked, weird, and wonderful.”
-Tim Hall, author of How America Died (Undie Press) |
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| “These stories change you, and not just a little bit. Try to forget them, tell yourself they’re not true, but it’s no use. Whether you want them to or not, they’re going with you.”
-Stephen Graham Jones, author of |
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| “While there is weirdness in these stories, not to mention biblical allegories and tales of suicide and the holocaust, what lingers is an underlying thread about the impact parents, fathers in particular, have on our lives whether through their presence or more often their absence. Ultimately, the stories are like a collective punch to the chest, though none more so than An Optimist is the Human Personification of Spring which caused me to lose my breath for a fleeting moment as I sat on the train and still haunts me even as I write this.”
-Ben Tanzer, author of |
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| “Oft fragmented in the post-modern style, Charactered Pieces is best read the same way you eat an elephant: one bite at a time. For those who enjoy the works of Kurt Vonnegut or Dave Eggers, this book is for you. If you only have time for one with your morning coffee, read “Refill”. Then come back and fill up on more.”
-Gloom Cupboard, Allie Dresser |
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| “…a celebration of characters who are cursed. With life…Whether destructive, apathetic, misshapen or addicted, the characters in this collection continue to chug forward like damaged locomotives that refuse to derail. Their power, it seems, is in their imperfections, and Ross shows us, without a doubt, he is a master of tragedy made gorgeous…Stark, vivid, and yes, often unsettling, Charactered Pieces grips you and won’t let go, pulling your eyes through the dark smudges of humanity’s rifts with a terrifying, skillful grace…Beneath the rubble of their lives, the characters in Charactered Pieces know who they are, and Ross challenges us to forsake them. But we cannot, for they are us.“
-Mel Bosworth, author of |
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| “These stories contain normal people crushed under the wheels of circumstance and the weight of guilt. The characters within are far beyond damaged– they are wrecked. Busted parents and screwed up kids; scarred, ruined, and weighed down with ten tons of remorse and pain wrapped in cancerous silence. Like individual flaws in the same junk diamond, they share some unspeakable pain in one way or another. But all this hurt isn’t dreamt up for the author’s detached amusement, or for the titillation of some nihilistic reader– this is a bid for communion where it is needed most. In each story the characters’ struggles are the result of some long-incubated despair, intimate and undeniable as a deathbed rasp.“
-Oxyfication.net, Jason Kane |
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| “Ross’ writing unfurls characters and plot with patience, allowing the layered meanings to filter from words into consciousness and realization. His prose is compact, dense with meaning, eloquent in its brevity. He crafts stories that are powerful, accessible, and unsettling enough to draw the reader in with curiosity about how these lives will play out, prompting the imagination to extend the implications long after the final word has been read.“
-Present Magazine, Pete Dulin |
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| “This collection of stories is one of the best I’ve read in a long time. The short form has always been my preference. I admire when a writer can take us immediately in and then release us in short duration. When it works, it is exhilarating. Caleb J. Ross delivers this.”
-Kristin Fouquet, author of |
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| “Much like the scratch-n-dent jewelry of the title story’s namesake, these flawed characters make their way through the treacherous literary terrain of Ross’s imagination, blasted by sandstorms and demolition crews, derided by their families and coworkers, wracked with guilt, and and seeking redemption in the fleeting margins between their text and your thumb. As seen under the cruel magnification of a loupe, these defects are but facets, however, and Ross’s sales pitch emphasizes the sentimental value in knowing their complete selves.”
-Gordon Highland, author of Major Inversions |
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| “Ross delivers exactly what you have come to expect from him: smart layers of fiction with thematically related elements. We see attention to strange details…and we see sick things that on occasion seem nudged into the foreground from where they stood, poised in the periphery…The pairing of innocence with tragedy and the parental dilemma forms- at least to me- the subtext of the “Charactered Pieces” stories. Thinking back to what I have read, Ross is at his best here. This book is a true credit to him.”
-Full of Crow, Lynn Alexander |
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Kind Words (from Jason Kane, here): “Caleb’s fiction is haunting and beautiful and disturbing and the opposite of timid. Un-timid? It recognizes no boundary. Like a spider loose in your walls.” (from Roger Sarao, here): “The range of stories is impressive, as is your tone and vocabulary. The stories themselves are unforgettable, as Stephen [Graham Jones] has stated. I’ll never get that yellow hardhat out of my mind. And now the cover makes sense! Writers amaze me — how on earth do you get the breadth of facts to make a story about the Middle East or demolitions (for example) sound so natural? Awesome debut!” (from Nik Korpon, here): “If you are the type of person who relishes written words–the sentence that encapsulates a life, the paragraphs of description scraped down to a single image, the phrase that echoes in your head all day–this is the type of book you want to read. These stories will haunt you.” (from Craig Wallwork, here): “It is a great achievement for any writer to see their work in print, but to produce a piece that could, given time, be a significant bit of storytelling of our age, is awe-inspiring.” (from Alex J. Martin, here): “His stories have never bored me, never failed to elicit shameful grins and so many minutes of that specific glee one gets from articulate, clever and confrontational literature.” |
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The Blog Orgy Tour
What is a blog tour? It’s a way for authors with no actual-tour budget to use the term “tour” when describing their marketing plans. Why a blog tour? The concept seems fun. I’m going to make stops at various personal and writing-related blogs, offering posts about Charactered Pieces, about me, and about writing in general, that will both promote my chapbook and honor the integrity of each blog I visit. These aren’t gimmicky advertisements. They are cleverly disguised advertisements. Where are the tour stops? Great question, hypothetical reader. [...] visit the dedicated Blog Orgy Tour page for all the stops. Also, as a bonus for die-hard groupies, some guest posts will contain notes regarding specific stories from Charactered Pieces. There are seven stories (eight if you count the acknowledgments, which is written in a story-like way), so there are seven author notes to track. A full list appears at the bottom of the dedicated page. |
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Sightings |
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| Author, Kristin Fouquet (Twenty stories from Rank Stranger Press) reads Charactered Pieces | |
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| Blank und Questions Asks – Caleb J Ross, author of Charactered Pieces: stories | Writer, Pela Via, reads Charactered Pieces |
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| Mel Bosworth reads the opening of CHARACTERED PIECES (10/9/09) for “Mel Bosworth Reads Things” | ArtJerk.net fills Charactered Pieces preorders with ACID cigar smoke as part of the fake Lungs for Readers program |
