Stories

Misplaced Alice Publication date: March 2002 Press: StringTown Press Format: Paperback Language: English ISBN: 0971896704 Buy Synopsis Misplaced Alice is a collection of seventeen very short stories. Many of the stories are only three pages long. They have appeared in magazines such as The Cortland Review, Chrysanthmum_, Timber Creek,_ and ZYZZYVA. Blurbs I was highly invigorated by these stories. They’re such exquisitely crafted aperçus of the droll and the macabre. Very Hitchcockian. The focus of the stories becomes very acute; the severe compression causes grotesque acts to appear even more grotesque. ...

The Moss Gatherers Publication date: March 2005 Press: StringTown Press Format: Paperback Language: English ISBN: 0971896739 Buy Synopsis A sense of the bizarre unique to the Northwest runs through the stories in Moss Gatherers: a French cyclist is murdered by supposed “moss gatherers” in costal Oregon; a child has fungus growing on his forehead; and an old woman wearing a crown of lit candles plays a Victrola in a cornfield. The stories are infused with a sense of decay and stagnancy lit by surprising flickers of human decency, however small: a young girl plays boogie-woogie at her brother’s wedding, and her family dances; an old woman tries to comfort a grieving teenager; and a woman preoccupied with safety leaves her front door wide open one night for the sake of a lost bird. Through these stories, we realize that the bizarre is always at the periphery of our otherwise mundane lives, and when we meet it, we are offered the chance to be forever changed. ...

Publication date: March 2013 Press: Publication Studio Portland Format: Paperback Language: English ISBN: 1624620663 Buy Publication Studio Paperback Synopsis Virility Rituals of North American Teenage Boys tells stories set at the boundary between real men and boys in man drag. In the title story, a man tells the various myths associated with his manhood from the Breakfast Club inspired obsession with “Elephantitis of the nuts” to an unexpected bodily testing sequence executed under the fluorescent glare of middle school lights. The characters in the fourteen stories live in the shadow of a failed macho culture. These stories have appeared in Birkensnake, The Chicago Review, Filter Magazine, MonkeyBicycle, Roethke Readings, Spork, and TRNSF Magazine. The Review of Contemporary Fiction wrote of Briggs’ stories, “As with the songs, the stories are all about life out of kilter, told with charm from the perspective of the odd as norm, not so much magical realism than delightfully pernicious absurdity.” ...