These fourteen stories, ranging from a few lines to several pages, play around a mongrel/domesticated-dog dichotomy employed by an author who’s ultimately dealing with lost characters in search of a place where to be the destructive self they demand to be.
In the opening story, the aftermath of an earthquake twists the narrator’s innards until a taboo confession slips between his teeth. Generation after generation, the men of a family find themselves outplayed by fate. A drifter stumbles upon a cult dedicated to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. A teacher has the chance to reconnect with an old friend after being teleported to a movie studio. A girl recounts her past lovers. Depression meets TV in a hybrid graph. The narrator’s parents’ remains join in wedlock. A bellhop facilitates an affair between two hotel guests. An intoxicated mascot rambles away. Up in the Carpathian Mountains, even cows refuse to speak. A shut-in woman makes the disconcerting discovery that she has a pornstar lookalike. From micro to macro, various declinations of the deity inform a man’s, a family’s, a country’s history. A schmuck attends a magic show. And, finally, three sisters play a dangerous game by acting as fence-sitters in wartime.
PRAISE FOR KENNEL-BORN
“Absurd. Beautiful. I loved it.”
—Arielle Tipa, author of ‘daughter-seed’
“What emerges here is a Willem Myra in search of his identity not as a writer but as someone who experiences themselves through others. Reading these fourteen stories is like using kaleidoscopic binoculars. Myra’s prose is fragmented, chameleonic, packed with symbolism. He seems to inhabit an instant hinged between real and surreal— and it’s no surprise if he’s less interested in providing answers than he is in posing questions.”
—formercactus magazine
Goodreads // Cover by Greg Leonard
surreal, black humor, experimental, prose poetry, flash fiction
