Available February 16th, World-wide
The Moon-Haunted Heart (50 short stories)
by Terrance Aldon Shaw
in paperback at:
as an e-book:
Nook (Barnes & Noble)
(*) If you order through Smashwords, enter the coupon code MH48F at check-out and receive 50 percent off the list price of $4.99. This code is good through March 1, 2016.
Σελήνη
(To Selene--The Moon)
I cast my dreams upon the void
Like corked epistles on a chartless
sea.
You who stumble upon these stories,
Tossed up, perhaps, upon some
foreign, tide-washed strand
May, reading close, discern the
cadence of my heart,
The tremblings of my naked soul in
all its brazen brokenness;
Its studied stillness and unchaste
aspiring;
Its manic, howling, vulgar, white-hot
wants;
Its winking, tongue-cheeked, wry,
bathetic eloquence,
Ebullient lust and blind
enlightenment,
The ecstasy of flesh and sense,
Sorrow and exultation,
Languor, levity, despair,
Roaring blood and brimming brain—
All that is me—
Distilled within that secret place
Where love and madness meet.
Sometimes,
the truest stories are about what almost
happened. Not what was, but what just as easily might have been. The would’ves,
the should’ves, the could’ves, the haunting maybes and the melancholy
might-haves are the fertile soil in which the most powerful and affecting fiction
takes root. Then too, sometimes, the most intriguing stories leave a bit of
mystery beyond the margins; small enigmas for the reader to ponder hours and
days after the book has been closed. Sometimes, the shortest stories are the
ones that stay with us the longest.
In his old age, W.B. Yeats famously remarked that “sex
and death are the only subjects worthy of a serious mind.” While I think there
may well be truth to that in an extremely broad sense, as I get older, I find
myself earnestly exploring issues, not only of mortality and desire, but also
of nostalgia, regret, isolation, loneliness and longing, lost inspiration and
the search for one's place in the cosmic scheme of things.
The
purpose of these stories—if they can be said to have any purpose beyond simply
being for their own sake—is not necessarily to arouse, but rather to explore
these aspects of the human condition through the lens of the erotic. If this
seems contradictory, it may well be. “Know thyself,” the Oracle at Delphi
famously declared, yet, if we are afraid to look at ourselves as sexual beings—naked,
vulnerable, passionate, longing—our lives are not wholly examined. We do not
truly know ourselves.
The fifty very-short pieces in this collection range
from as many as 4,000 to as few as 50 words. There are brief vignettes—entire
worlds conjured up within the space of an eye-blink—alongside more conventionally
expansive narratives. The moods, settings, characters, and ideas found here
represent many of the things that are near to my heart and seldom far from my
thoughts: There are a number of stories about the erotic dimensions of
‘disability,’ particularly visual impairment. There are pansexual
celebrations—the hetero- and homoerotic along with the intentionally
ambivalent. There are richly atmospheric scene-settings, effusive literary
evocations, and casual pop-culture-inspired dialogues, orneriness and ecstasy, contemporary
vulgarity
and timeless transcendence standing cheek by jowl; low comedy, erotic horror
and lambent exultation comfortably sharing the same space, breathing the same
air, seeking the same truth.
Writers
live in hope that what they write will have meaning, though it is almost always
left to readers to find it. If you find meaning in these stories of mine—if you
find pleasure, joy, enlightenment, inspiration and encouragement in them—I wish
you well.
Terrance
Aldon Shaw
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