Public Works: Short Fiction and a Novella - Tapa blanda

The stories in Public Works have as much honesty and pathos as they do wry perceptions about themselves and the nature of fiction. In their droll and fascinating self-consciousness, not only do these pieces inspect the intimate mechanisms of creating fiction, but also the bizarre (real) world literature inhabits, from lit mag offices and soirees, to readers' unconscious expectations and needs. - Cris Mazza, author of Disablity

From the manic, single-sentence fiction ""Public Sentence"" to the carefully structured and plot-twisting ""We Stand Here, Swinging Cats,"" Grimes' stories have an and associative quality - nothing follows predictably from anything, and beginnings never foreshadow ends. While reading, one has the sense that, despite recognizable voices and themes, this imagination seems alien, as though it were divvying up and parceling out the world peculiarly. In ""Glue Trap,"" a one-legged shopkeeper offers expert instruction in the art of one-on-one combat with a rat. In ""Making Love: a Translation,"" the stream of consciousness creates a fiction as simple as Hemingway, as wistful and disassociative as Julio Cortazar. Ultimately, Grimes' stories question the grids and schemes we impose on ""reality"". His is a formal defiance of the tyranny of traditional narrative, expressed with a thematic daring that moves between the contemplation of the ordinary and high art.