This week’s other featured book, “In This Ground,” by Beth Castrodale, can be found by scrolling down this post, along with the First Tuesday Replay. Or, just click the author’s name on our Authors page.
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THE BOOK: The OK End of Funny Town.
PUBLISHED IN: 2020.
THE AUTHOR: Mark Polanzak .
THE PUBLISHER: BOA Editions.
SUMMARY: A fastidious pet robot with a knack for knitting. A soporific giant pitching camp in the middle of a city. A mysterious mime whose upcoming performance has the whole town on edge. The stories in Mark Polanzak’s BOA Short Fiction Prize-winning The OK End of Funny Town stitch fantastic situations into the drab fabric of everyday life. Polanzak delights in stretching every boundary he encounters, from the academic focus on practical learning at the New Community School, to the ever-changing tastes of diners in search of the next big trend in local cuisine. Wondrous yet familiar, The OK End of Funny Town excavates the layers between our collective obsession with passing fads and our secret yearning for lasting connection.
THE BACK STORY: I’ve always been drawn to works outside of realism, especially in short stories. The collection is composed of my explorations in the forms of speculative fiction. The stories span 15 years of writing, from the University of Arizona MFA program, when I was in my mid-twenties, up through last year. The collection is divided into four sections: 1—Meet Fabulous Strangers! 2—Travel to Fantastic Places! 3—Witness Magical Things! 4—Experience Surreal Times. These sections correspond with the types of unreal stories I have been writing: fabulism, surrealism, absurdism. They often center on an unreal character or unreal setting, event, or object. Some stories come from real-life experiences that I blow up, distort, twist, or swerve into impossible territory, others are total fantasies and experiments.
WHY THIS TITLE?: The OK End of Funny Town is the name of a story in the collection. I chose it because it conjures, for me, what I want my writing to do—explore something real and perhaps sad through an absurd and perhaps comic lens. Sad-funny-weird, that’s what I was going for, and the title says that to me!
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? This collection is for folks who like magical realism, absurdism, surrealism, readers who like to see reality morph into fantasy, or who like to fantasy infiltrate reality. Things get weird quick in this.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
“What a joyfully playful collection, full of giants, robots, and pink toilets, as well as loss, resilience, family, and the slipperiness of time. Polanzak’s giddy imagination and crisp, rhythm-driven sentences delight the mind and the ear.” — Aimee Bender, author of Willful Creatures
“The end of town Mark Polanzak haunts is a fabulous fabulist’s zone where all sorts of smart, poignant magic occurs. After reading these stories, you’ll never view your personal robot, or reality, the same way again.” — Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark
“Polanzak’s collection is rich and packed with visionary tales that are sure to entertain speculative fiction readers.” — Booklist
“These 19 stories introduce themes of commonplace people in remarkable situations, with touches of the surreal and the sublime. Visiting this tragicomic world, which won the BOA Short Fiction Prize, will reward those looking for an exciting and original new voice in fiction.” — Shelf Awareness
AUTHOR PROFILE: I grew up in Canton, Mass, a well-to-do suburb outside Boston. I got interested in writing in high school, where I wrote short plays and took my first creative writing class. When I was 17, my father died suddenly. I wrote about this tragedy—and I wrote about writing about this tragedy—in my first book, a hybrid thing of fiction and memoir called POP! (Stillhouse Press, 2016). I majored in creative writing at Skidmore College, and then went to the University of Arizona’s MFA program in fiction. I loved being in workshops, talking about stories with other people who loved being in workshops and talking about stories. I love the writers’ group I’m in now. I teach courses in literature and writing to young musicians at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. I live with my wife in Salem, Mass.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: I have loved the wild, imaginative, and unreal work of Steven Millhauser, Kathryn Davis, Italo Calvino, George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Jorge Luis Borges, Haruki Murakami, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellson, Octavia Butler, Kurt Vonnegut, HG Wells, Franz Kafka, Kobo Abe, Stacey Richter, Ursula K. LeGuin, and others, and I really wanted to write some weird, sad, funny stuff.
SAMPLE CHAPTER:
The following story, “Giant,” originally appeared in The Southern Review, and was reprinted in Best American Nonrequired Reading.
“Giant”
The surprisingly few eyewitness reports stated that the giant walked, more or less, up Main Street from the west, stepping on the pavement and sometimes in patches of trees in parks and backyards, just before dawn. He stopped in the square, choosing to sit in the brick courtyard of the city hall, and leaned back against the big stone church, blocking off traffic on Elm and Putnam. Authorities discovered that he had successfully avoided stomping on parked cars and most of the city’s infrastructure, but that many swing sets, water fountains, jungle gyms, basketball hoops, grills, and gardens had been “smooshed.” No one knew if any birds or squirrels, likely sleeping in the parks and backyards, had been flattened.
The giant was still sitting in the square in the morning. A crisp and blue Monday morning in September. We found police cruisers and fire trucks parked with lights flashing in a two-block radius of the giant. Residents of the buildings within the zone were evacuated. Businesses were cleared and shuttered. There wasn’t a TV or radio station broadcasting anything but news of the giant. Live footage from a helicopter aired endlessly. The giant was taller than the city hall, the stone church, and the apartment buildings, even while sitting. Few of us saw him erect. He wore baggy tattered brown pants drawn by a red rope, an ill-fitting faded green shirt, and no shoes. He was human. He had human feet. Human hands. A brown satchel was strapped around his torso. He occasionally reached into the satchel to remove handfuls of giant berries and something else that crunched and echoed throughout town. He had long, stringy blond hair that fell on either side of his face, down to his shoulders—except in back, where a few strands had been pulled and tied up with a giant red band. No one had heard him speak. No one, as far as we knew, had attempted to communicate.
Since the giant seemed to have purposefully avoided crushing our homes and cars and had made no indication that he wanted to hurt us, we did not panic. Even the flashing lights and sirens did not inspire anxiety. The newscasts were not fear-driven. The reporters were curious. It wasn’t an emergency to anyone. It was awe-striking. Eventually, the sirens were silenced. The flashers were shut off. You could hear laughter in the streets. When he reached for more food, there were gasps of joy. Children were held on shoulders to have a look.
The mayor, around three o’clock that first day, was raised up on a cherry picker and handed a megaphone. He said to the giant, “Hello.” The whole town was silent, awaiting a response. When, after a minute had passed and the giant had reached for another handful of food, the mayor repeated himself, adding his name, title, the name of our city, and a welcome message. To our great delight, the giant finally acknowledged the mayor, turning to him and emanating a ground-shaking three-syllable reply. But we could not understand. He was not an English speaker.
Professors from the language department of the university listened to the recording, determining that it was not something they had ever heard before. Linguistic anthropologists then went to work on the recording. They were not sure either. Verbal communication was placed on hold.
None of us went to work that first day. No child went to school. Many of us chuckled after remarking that the giant had put things in perspective. Our work seemed small. Our schools seemed small. The giant was all we cared about, and no one disputed it. How could we get our paperwork done with the giant down the street? How could any teacher concentrate on her lesson? There was no way our kids would do math problems with a real, live giant outside.
The influx of reporters and visitors slammed our streets and hotels and bars and restaurants that first night. You could talk with the person seated next to you. There wasn’t a chance they’d be discussing anything else. You could talk with anyone on the street. What do you do in a situation like this? He doesn’t want to hurt us. He can’t talk with us. He just looks tired, don’t you think? He keeps sighing and eating. Have you seen that he fell asleep? He sleeps with his head resting on the post office? Did you hear him snore? It sounded like low rolling thunder. Yes, it was soothing. And how he scoops gallons of water from the river with his hand?
Although the mayor had spoken with him, no one had attempted to touch him until the third day. After town meetings to devise the best plan to approach the giant, it was decided that the mayor and thirty policemen would carry flags with every conceivable peaceful symbol drawn on them. A peace sign. A pure white flag. Two hands shaking. The word LOVE. The word WELCOME. Pictures of people waving and smiling. Big flags. Big signs. They would walk cautiously up to the giant. We decided to make an offering. A barrel of orange juice. A loaf of bread the size of a school bus. We would place these before him and back away, waiting for him to notice that we were being kind. Then the mayor and policemen would walk closer and closer, extending hands and shaking each others’ hands to demonstrate what we meant.
Everything went as planned. But the giant never reached down to touch anyone. When the mayor got close enough, he touched the giant’s heel. The giant did not notice. This was frustrating. He ate the bread in a single chomp. He tossed the barrel of OJ into his mouth, crunched, and swallowed. He went back to sighing, wiping his brow and resting.
The giant is not interested in us. He is not curious about us in the slightest. He eats, drinks, rests, sighs, and sleeps. He has made no attempt to look any of us, save for the mayor that first day, in the eye. He has not thanked us for the food. He has not apologized for trampling our parks and gardens and recreation areas. He has not offered any help of any kind.
Not long ago, we began to wonder why we were so curious. What, apart from his obvious size, made him any more interesting than any of us? Why were we constantly talking about him, for days and weeks on end? Why were we fascinated every time he reached for his satchel or scratched his forearm? We all still talked to each other, but the conversation turned. We had waited long enough. We wanted to know if anything was going to happen, or if we were just going to have to live with a giant in our square. A dumb oaf that caused people to move out of their homes, that caused the government to move the offices of city hall and the post office to other buildings. If he were of normal size, he would be completely uninteresting. He would be mentally deficient, mangy. We would pity him. He contributed nothing. He took. He stole. He trespassed. He destroyed. He frustrated and incensed. He was boring.
When we travel, when we mention where we live and people ask, Isn’t that the town with the giant? we sigh, Yes. When we return home, we ask if it is still there. And our neighbors give the sarcastic answer, Oh, he wouldn’t go anywhere, don’t you worry. When we walk to the bus stop, we glance up at him with as much amazement as we do down to our watches. We know what
we’d see. We would see a giant, sitting there, eating and drinking. We’d see a tired monster, not interesting enough to even hurt us. We’d see him wipe his brow. Then we’d check the time.
LOCAL OUTLETS:
It would be cool if you bought the book through McNally Jackson Books in Brooklyn, https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/ Trident Bookstore in Boston, https://www.tridentbookscafe.com/ Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, http://www.harvard.com/ Or directly through BOA Editions at http://www.boaeditions.org
PRICE: $17.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: I wouldn’t mind hearing from you at polanzak@gmail.com. You can also connect through http://www.draftjournal.com. Thanks!
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 