The Improbable Road of Return

 
 

Enjoy This Excerpt From The Novel…

Sauvey is seventy plus. He certainly didn’t put his hands on me. I don’t even have to say such a thing, or even think for a minute that he might. But then isn’t that it? Men with restraint?


Isn’t that what men always are? They are always holding back their power.


He was dealing with me, too, God. What would I have done had I been him? Probably the same thing. Stand there like a jackass, pretending to reach up and grab the clapper, mime ringing
the bell vigorously, welcoming me home.

High above his mockery the bell hung still.

But even in the silence of that one bell I couldn’t stand it. Where were all the bells in the whole city? Sauvey was a history buff enough to be a respectable citizen of Philly, that city of so much resounding separation, but I should have shouted back asking where were they all—all the bells. When I was like that mosaic tile-work of what it means to be me Sauvey was a city of bells. How I hated his insistence for me to be loved. But then it was there, the whole of it, every still bell in the whole city was his love for me that I never even had to rip apart. It was always there—the love I pushed away—and I left it stunted, thwarted, and not quite laughed at like all the still bells, the never ringing history. How was it my right? Why did I deny the man? That was my Sauvey, city of bells somehow just too loud, too old, and still too much as if a single bachelor bell in one cupola could be part of my city’s silenced carillon.


 
 

RADAR ROAD

 
 
 

The Best of On Impulse highlights an exploration of twenty-first century narrative. In four collections that move from raw to refined, the On Impulse series invites the reader to contemplate how we use language now: online, in full-length books, and with each other. Morgan Kiger arranged this fifth collection to stand on its own while showcasing the series's original trajectory from catharsis to craft. 

 

Acquainted with Squalor

 

Acquainted with Squalor delivers astonishing power of body-and-soul. Meteors fall, an old neighbor tosses an infrared Phoenix beacon into a cup of loose change, and a woman on the phone with a friend mentions nothing about her eviction notice. These nine stories nourish our sense of wonder and acknowledge our deepest despair. Who has the endearing audacity to call a lover "Governor General"? Who will sit down together on a hot day to eat frozen blueberries on a country lawn? Nath Jones captures what it means for us to be at home and still awash in the world.

 

The War is Language

 

“My So-called Life” grows up to be no less angst-ridden, but now with legal emancipation from political correctness, and a brutally honest inner voice (which has since grown a potty-mouth), offers a (sometimes) deceivingly flip, pathology into the everyday life of self-indulgent 30-somethings “feeling too much nothing and too much all.” Painfully honest. Unhealthily cathartic. Lift the lid, light a “sleep-deprivation cigarette,” and commiserate. Winner of the 2013 Eric Hoffer E-book Fiction Award

. . . . . . . .

 

2000 Deciduous Trees

 

2000 Deciduous Trees is an exploration of individual experience selected from Nath Jones’s ‘90s zine, The Skirt. Many pieces are vignettes. But "Hollace and Some Girl" is a memorable fiction short story. Overall, as a short story book, the writing resists losing its balance during a time when gasoline was cheap and no one drove slowly on the cusp of the new millennium. The voice yearns for change. But nothing can be done in a twenty-something world where one-night stands get forgotten with execution-style murders.

 

Love & Darts

You'll be entranced by these twenty-four stories as Nath Jones finds her way into this fun and biting life. She conducts you from the kaleidoscopic moment when a toddler loses her innocence to the last breath an old man takes in a rowboat at sunrise. About the On Impulse eBook Series: We each have an impulse to share our experience. These four collections of short works explore storytelling from catharsis to craft. Over the course of this series Nath Jones's writing style develops from the raw, associative, tyrannic rambles of cathartic non-fiction, flash fiction, and rant in The War is Language and our digital domains, to the delightful rough-hewn vignettes of 2000 Deciduous Trees, into the compact characterizations of the fictionalized tellings in Love & Darts, and finally toward How to Cherish the Grief-Stricken's fully-crafted short stories that use literary devices and narrative elements to reveal a world well-rendered.

Anderbo 2012 Self-Published Book Award Entry of Note