Metaphysical Tales: Stories

Introduces a writer of extraordinary skill and vision.
- Joyce Carol Oates

What Eugene Garber's Metaphysical Tales remind us of is that we are all seekers.

The heroes of Garber's stories sometimes look a lot like us, sometimes appear exotic. But under the skin they are us, even if that us is a buried us.

Think of reading these stories as a process of unearthing our deepest desires. What do our heroes seek? Often familiar goals--admiration, love, divine favor. But whatever it is, the first lesson they have to learn is that it's not to be found on the surface of things. It's not to be easily won.

So it's not surprising that these seekers often resort to stratagems that will seem to the reader (but only for a while) bizarre. One seeker must peel away the skins of buried memories layer by layer until he reaches the archetypal woman of his inner life. An artist must paint a portrait of a lethal pair of lovers to save her soul. Another will look for truth in the adoration of a deformed child. Another will find his life's purpose at the end of the trajectory of a bullet, another in the mouths of cannibals.

And there is inevitably Eros, whether the longing hero looks in the mirror of same gender or different gender, whether in tenderness or violence.

Author: Eugene K. Garber
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Transformations Press
Published: 09/07/2018
Pages: 274
Weight: 0.77lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.62d
ISBN: 9781732103825
2nd Edition

About the Author
Garber, Eugene K.: - EUGENE K. GARBER has published six books of fiction and is the creator, with eight other artists, of EROICA, a hypermedia fiction (http: //hypereroica.com/). His fiction has won the Associated Writing Programs Short Fiction Award and the William Goyen Prize for Fiction sponsored by TriQuarterly. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the New York State Council of the Arts. His short fiction has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction (1988), Revelation and Other Fiction from the Sewanee Review, The Paris Review Anthology, and Best American Short Stories.Oates, Joyce Carol: - Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978Hassan, Lynn: - LYNN HASSAN is a visual artist who has exhibited in California, New York, and Eastern Europe. Exhibitions at international art festivals include multiple mixed-media installations for Periferic 2000, Iasi, Romania, and the CarbonArt 2004 Memory Project in Chisinau, Republic of Moldova. Recent exhibitions include Pratt Institute, When Brooklyn Artists Speak, Art Listens, and Brooklyn College Gallery, Painters, Musicians, Sculptors. Her work is featured in several publications including Downtown Brooklyn; the literary journal for Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus; Thirteenth Moon, SUNY, Albany, NY; Beasts in Their Wisdom by Eugene K. Garber, and collaborative hypermedia work Eroica.