Matt F. Amati’s For Sale: Baby Shoes, Feet Included

  

Matt F. Amati’s new collection of flash and short fiction, For Sale: Baby Shoes, Feet Included, is not for all sensibilities nor all senses of humor. The quirky and the oddball, however, will find their troves of treasure : stories dystopian, stories fairtytalish, stories poetic, stories grotesque, and stories simply strange. Their nature is so concentrated as to be as much prose as poetry of a kind, a long and free form of dense and hypnogogical images that will mark your mind.

Just a taste of titles gives out the sounding chords this spicilegium plays upon: "About Her Bones so Bleak and Bare"; 'The Word 'Blindness' Repeated Endlessly by a Broken Mechanical Bird"; "100 Cheerful Facts about the Square of the Hypotenuse." Such bizarre delights could only have been written by, as the author describes himself, someone who "has lived in various places on earth and worked jobs that have included farmhand, talk show assistant, Mandarin interpreter, line cook, and professor of Ancient Greek." 

Take warning from the title itself that tells you you're in for the literary as well, albeit a literary that is viewed through a strange and funhouse mirror lens, allusive breadcrumbs strewn through,  finding you and losing you. A better analogy would perhaps be: bursting with little chocolate chips of rich allusion. The chocolate is dark. Very dark. But oh so delicious to those who have acquired that taste.

Author’s Blurb : 

From the imagination of Matthew F. Amati comes 18 stories of the weird and macabre. In "To Comfort the Headless Child" a nightmarish infant screams as he's read twisted Dr. Seuss stories like "Rat In The Hat" and "There’s A Hookworm In My Hippocampus." "Our Lady Cinderella of the Dying World" gives us evil stepsisters who toss expensive shoes, rubies, and furniture onto garbage scows, while the cobbler hero of "One of a Perfect Pair" must avoid being made into human-skin sandals himself.

If you find that you've a hankering for more of this author's special recipes, "Loompaland" is available from Lurgid Bee Books