Difficult People: Adult Storybook of 172 Flash Fictions

Anthropologist and fiction writer Jim Stallings celebrates his eighth volume of fiction by sharing a bold adult storybook collection of short-short spontaneously composed tales. These 172 flash fictions are like spontaneous Zen portrait tales revealing quirky destiny-imbued slice-of-life moments or whole lives at a glance.

San Antonio, TX (PRWEB) May 26, 2009 -- Jim Stallings and Amazon's publishing arm, CreateSpace, officially announced the release of his eighth published book, in paperback and e-book formats, a volume of 172 flash tales, Difficult People.

In composing these daily flash fictions over the years Stallings found they are somewhat whimsical, somewhat blue, even curiously comical, while other tales take a truly edgy, dark tragic turn. With the inherent need for immediate conflict in a short narrative, many of the stories scope out the war between the sexes, an endless battlefield of erotica and cleverness. (Be forewarned, many of these erotic tales require a tolerant, mature reader; they are not for squeamish or juvenile readers.) Because of their brevity, the success of the stories depends in part on seeing the character in depth; that's why he sometimes refers to them as karmic tales or biographies or sometimes as karmic portraits, whether slice-of-life moments or whole life summaries.

Stallings holds with his longtime professional experience in composing fiction: Jim has said about the art of writing: "Writing, the act of composing, is a daily, almost religious act of catharsis and realization. For about ten years, writing daily with my left hand, I scribbled into notebooks collected from travels a suddenly realized tale, usually in less than an hour. This was a kind of morning wake up exercise. I listened for the voice, waited for the image, and then went with the narrative to the end. From there I've learned from my various writing teachers (James Dickey, Robert Penn Warren, and Larry Heinemann) to rewrite and read aloud until the language, the vision and voice come together. I especially enjoy the sprint of short, spontaneous, Zen-like stories; the marathon of scripts and novels are almost the same thing but repeated many times over. I've always favored the 100 yard dash and the quarter mile to twenty-six miles to break on through to the other side."

Stallings first published a collection of short fictions called Tales for Commuters & Other Time Travelers back in 2002 and still in print. This was aimed at the busy reader who maybe had a bit of reading time on a train, plane, vacation or perhaps bedtime reading. The pieces in this new collection, Difficult People, are even on average much shorter, usually a page in length; they range in reading time from a minute or two up to perhaps five minutes, yet try to capture a complete essence about these troubled and troubling people. The author hopes these micro-fictions may be quite compatible also for mobile readers using e-book on the computer or hand held devices like the Kindle.

Jim Stallings is an anthropologist, writer and editor. His other seven books include Tales for Commuters & Other Time Travelers; Hunters in the Fog: War Diary to Screenplay; Neon Nirvana: A Romance of the New Age; the New England mystery, Devil's Hopper; the detective mystery novel The Latest Bloodshed about the Deep South's drug wars and social conflicts; and an escape suspense novel about the Grand Canyon, Getting To Know You; his seventh work was the haiku collection, Dispatches from Tumbleweed, a study of a poet's return to the American Southwest after a generation's absence. See his website: http://www.jimstallings.com for more on his bio, philosophy, other works and contact information.

About Difficult People: Flash Fictions. Published May 2009, $12.95 paperback (ISBN: 978-1440416613) by Amazon.com; & an e-book, $12.95 (EAN13: 9781440416613) from Amazon's CreateSpace; available direct from amazon.com, or off the author's website: http://www.jimstallings.com/

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