By Soren Narnia
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All works copyright by Soren Narnia. They may not be reproduced or retransmitted without permission.
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Books
They Say Words Will Return to You When Faces Won't
From Sketch of a Bird in Flight, the poignant story of a lonesome gunslinger’s run from the law and the work of art which brings a ray of beauty into his tragic life, to Bride, Groom, Sunday, Forever, the account of a couple’s unusual and desperately honest on-stage wedding ceremony, this volume spans every corner of the imagination, presenting both novellas and short stories from a variety of genres. Adelaine follows a reluctant spy on a simple mission endangered by the deception of a fragile young woman, and in The Curtain and the Earth, an American engineer witnesses the Stath-Khellian Fissure, a genocide whose horrors drive him to an alternate reality in which the hand of God itself intervenes in humanity’s self-immolation. Decibels is a tale of suspense pitting a deaf criminal against his captive in a strange game of lies where the power of sound takes on life and death consequences, while An Oral History of Hell explores the afterworld through the eyes of a man intent on a redemptive path out of that wintry, desolate land. In all of these tales, the male heart tries above all things to find some sort of truth, some moment of meaning, amidst the enduring chaos of life's long journey.
A Listing of the Holdings of the National Museum of Romance
In December of 2003, the National Museum of Romance in Tristia, New Jersey, closed its doors due to lack of funding. On December 14, collectors came to bid on the artifacts in the museum's permanent collection, fascinated by the stories of passion, yearning, and heartache behind each item. From the longest breakup letter ever written (214 pages), to the movie prop which represented true love for an actress who died knowing it only on the screen, to the lawnmower used to fashion one of history's most time-consuming and comically aborted marriage proposals, the museum was filled with the evidence of ordinary people who became extraordinary in the thrall of desire. Poignant, awe-inspiring, and sometimes just plain funny, the artifacts described within these pages were highly coveted by those who came to buy them that cold winter's day--especially by one secretive and jaded bidder who arrived ready to give up everything to reclaim his past.
Roll! They Cried
Some ballplayers have their glory fade slowly, some stick around just one season too long. Then there's Ben "The Blemish" Glinton, whose catastrophic failure in the biggest game of his life tainted his middling career and everything that came afterwards. Years later, a chance meeting with a young fan opens his eyes to the possibilities of APBA Baseball, the time-honored tabletop simulation game which Ben sees as a vehicle for reputation rehabilitation. If he can master the game, stage a tournament of top players, and coach his simulated self to victory through the intelligent management of dice, cards, and charts, he can finally know peace. His obstacles to regaining his past glory include an irritating training regimen under the watch of a mysterious APBA guru, a cross-country journey in a vehicle unfit for even driveway travel, and a collection of fellow board game diehards whose friendship makes it rather tough to concentrate on ultimate victory. The comic novel Roll! They Cried is a light-hearted salute to a lifestyle which has consumed thousands with its benevolent opportunities for athletic greatness in miniature.
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Tyrant, Draw Thy Sword
The year was 2007, and conditions in the Joke, one of the most squalid and dangerous housing projects in America, were at their worst. When its residents were displaced through a deal to sell the land to a predominantly white Christian university, tensions in the community rose to a breaking point. Finally, a televised debate about the crisis led to a Congressman’s unforgivable public slur, and a civil rights leader’s shocking act of martyrdom. It was then that the last remaining citizens of the Joke--gang members, drug dealers, and desperate men turned remorseless freedom fighters--vowed not to give up its deserted streets without a battle to the death. Told as an oral history from a distance of two decades, Tyrant, Draw Thy Sword is a grim snapshot of a December night when this country watched its troubled divide between cultures become tragically violent.
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Eyeball vs. Internet
What is the stupidest book you’ve ever read? How did it make you feel? Now pick up Eyeball vs. Internet. Feel its weight in your hands, look at its spine, run your fingers over the cover. Inside are the stupid words and stupid rants and stupid confessions of dozens of stupid people, page after page of verbose goop that never seems to end. Put all your memories of bad books behind you; Eyeball vs. Internet is the one that will set up shop permanently in the corners of your mind like a decrepit deli that changes ownership every few years and occasionally prints their nasty take-out menu on a slightly different shade of yellow paper but never seems to go away no matter how gentrified the area gets or how many times the paper says that a new stretch of highway is soon going to mercifully wipe out the whole strip mall. To make matters worse, it’s called Eyeball vs. Internet. So…you wanna buy one?
Witherheart
A lone U.S. soldier stalks the burning ruins of a Baltimore slum hours after its total immolation by fire, hunting its sole surviving citizen for one purpose: to deliver a revenge which has festered for three decades and caused thousands to violently lose their lives. Thus ends a love story. Beginning in Germany with an intimate confession of passion and ending with a disastrous military action to capture America's most wanted enemy, Witherheart traces the struggle among four men to take possession of the mysterious secret of eternal life. When a tortured immortal, blinded by his love for an unattainable woman, attempts to end his solitude through extreme means, it touches off a perpetual chain of vicious reprisals. Two fathers and two sons are slowly torn apart, and the social fabric of America itself is threatened as Witherheart's heroes and villains lash out from the shadows of their tragic isolation.
Lillinandra
Does a book even have to exist to spark the imagination and linger there? Can the idea of a story sometimes hold greater power if the story is never brought to life? Within these pages is a collection of anonymous voices. They each want to tell you the essence, the details, the impact of a book they've read. That the works they describe aren't real leaves it entirely to the imagination whether they were masterpieces, failures, or something in between. Epic romances, thrillers, comedies, stories of war, loss, and triumph, collections of photographs, bizarre prose experiments--they are spoken of one by one by people who have not been able to forget what the pages made them feel. Lillinandra summons volumes that cannot be celebrated or condemned by critics, the public, or the passage of time. They belong to everyone and no one, and they will all, in their own way, be perfect forever, perhaps more enduring than if they had actually been born.
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Sicko, I Set You Free: A Treasury of Erotica for the Easily Amused
Just because something's a book, that doesn't mean it has to be tasteful. Sicko, I Set You Free is a collection of the funniest erotica the author could think of while listening to his editor drone on and on about the genius of William Faulkner. Within these artistically dubious pages, staid small town journalists, minimum wage food court workers, brilliant Victorian detectives, and even immortal vampires who should know better fall prey to their unhealthy nude whims. Not for the faint of heart or the unpolluted of soul, Sicko, I Set You Free is precisely the kind of book your parents warned would lead you to wind up exactly like that no-good Andy Mittendorf down the street. And just as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Our Town did, these twelve euphemism-laden stories should prove once and for all that men are utterly worthless sex fiends.
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Those Snowy Nights You Read to Me, They'll Never Be Forgotten
One volume, four immensely different novellas. Thirty Thousand Pieces sets up the ultimate battle between art and commerce, as a vengeful literary genius uses a landmark book deal to bring down the publishing house which crosses him. Little Boy Games is a baseball story, a celebratory biography of a left fielder whose heroic exploits on the diamond preclude a fall which opens his eyes to grander definitions of glory and triumph. Love Story With Just One Hesitant Kiss follows an angry young man on a journey across the afterlife to get back to the girl whose empathy almost redeemed him before his untimely end. The finale, Incantations, is a dark, sometimes violent tale of paranormal researchers pressed to the edge of reason by uncountable personal stresses. Their chaotic investigation of what might be an authentically haunted church forces them to confront horrors far more intimate than mere phantoms and ghosts.
Song of the Living Dead
The zombies rose, they walked, the world went mad, and then the zombies laid down again--all without committing a single act of actual violence. Song of the Living Dead uses the words of scholars, politicians, and baffled eyewitnesses to recount the days of the strangest plague in this country's history. The restless dreamer Lionel chimes in with his own account of his travels with a close-knit group of survivors seeking freedom in the post-zombie chaos. The difficult choices he faces in a new America which has shocked him with its inability to unite in crisis become far more frightening when the dead rise once more. This time they are not so docile, and Lionel must try even harder to understand the design of an absurd universe lost in the realm of B-horror movies--and more vivid real-life tragedies.
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Whatever You Find Within You
Whatever You Find Within You is a romantic comedy of both solemn longing and bumbling confusion, and the rather fine line between the two. When an unread love story by the great nineteenth century Icelandic playwright Dari Stanislad is discovered in 2003 by the brain trust of an educational institution of dubious reputation, numerous obsessed parties squabble like over-stimulated chickens over its vast financial and intellectual significance. Just one problem: the play is incredibly awful, and promises benign ruin on all who dare turn its lousy pages. In no time, The Cobbleswoddler's Tale becomes a magnet for literary chaos--but on the plus side, it does bring together a pair of lonely and frustrated academics with fading dreams, wildly different opinions of romance, and a strong desire to get as far away as possible from Dick's Notch Community College. This volume also contains Noonrisers, a heartfelt ode to unemployed goofballs everywhere.
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3:13 a.m.
It is 3:13 a.m., and now the human imagination reaches out to places and yearnings that it shies away from during life’s daylight hours of quiet desperation. The brief parables, random episodes, and emotional wanderings within these pages act as a repository of all that can be felt and dreamed when the night is dark, the soul is alone, and our thoughts become uncaged until the first blue of dawn ends the spell.
Sold at www.lulu.com.
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Knifepoint Horror: Book One
Knifepoint Horror is an original genre which strips tales of supernatural suspense down to such a raw, minimalist form that literally nothing is left over to allow the mind a respite of even a single paragraph. To accomplish this, the most primal element of storytelling--a single human voice describing events exactly as it experienced them--is adhered to without embellishment or exception. Within these pages lie taut, unadorned first person narratives from agonized souls, minus all the stylish techniques which dilute, stretch, and burden tales of terror with unnecessary detail. Here you will find no entry into the thoughts of any characters other than the narrator’s, no standard passages of dialogue, no humor, no extraneous gore, no romance. The untitled stories inside this book spill forward without page or even paragraph breaks. Written in cold, emotionless capital letters, they take the form of uninterrupted confessions, creating an effect of pure campfire terror. Knifepoint strips away all the tired conventions which water down traditional horror fiction, leaving nothing but the story’s riveting spine to compel and chill you to the core.
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Wanderings
The Cavalcade of the Iffy
When you don't know what to write, make easy jokes at the expense of others, archive them, repeat.
The Washington Horror Tour
Take a grim video excursion through the city you only thought you knew.
Loft: The Rules and History of the Greatest Sport Never Played
For seven years around the turn of the twenty-first century, America was enthralled by the one of the most intense sporting competitions ever invented. The game of Loft demanded extraordinary precision, athleticism, daring, and intelligence, rewarding only those who made a total physical and intellectual commitment. Here, a former player remembers Loft’s rules and history, giving a thorough explanation of its mystique. He describes in vivid detail the annual tournament which captivated the country and pays tribute to the two men who most defined the sport: its enigmatic creator and its indomitable, single-minded superstar. The merging of their fates makes the story into an ode to both the heartbreak and the majesty of transience, while Loft’s intriguing twists fill page after page of this must-read for any true sports fan who dreams of something new, innovative, and loaded with promise.
God Cannot Know You Shed Your Tears for Others
This short film attempts to explain the most enigmatic catastrophe in human history. On an autumn day in 2007, a sudden and unexplained streak of wind more than twice as powerful as any hurricane ever recorded annihilated the towns of Matoon and Dears Fall, Nebraska. Unlike any other disaster throughout time, it forced mankind to re-imagine itself as a mere puppet under the will of powers more mysterious than ever thought possible.
Held in the Thrall of the Awful
A tribute to the worst movie ever made. No, it's not what you think. It's worse.
Toward the Close of November
Two strangers who have known only loneliness and tragedy come together for one immense act of hope and defiance.
Spirits Broken, Reasonable Rates
I've gone across the country on Greyhound. Let me share with you the agony.
Awkward Silences: An Audio Treasury
A CD the world needs so badly I can't even stand to think about it.
Nailbiter Games
Everybody needs a hobby. Here's one with no future!
My Poem About Kicking Your Ass
Last but not least, this is my poem about kicking your ass.
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