“Sometimes stories that I’ve used to mythologize my childhood resurface
in my mind as actual memories … Perhaps if you tell a story enough times, it
will become the truth.”
This admission by Mark Greensleeves, the compulsive liar in the story, Some
Facts About Me, sums up Frank Burton’s sharp, surreal and subversive short
story collection, A History of Sarcasm. The seventeen stories in
this collection blur the boundaries between fact and fantasy through a series
of obsessive characters and their skewed versions of reality. Among them
are a man who insists on living every aspect of his life in alphabetical order,
a girl who believes she is receiving secret messages through the TV, a
paranoiac who is pursued by an army of giant lobsters, and an academic who turns
into a cat.
Funny, dark and relentlessly off the wall, this collection brings together
the best of Frank Burton’s published work with some brand new stories.
Buy it from Amazon.
