BARE ANA AND OTHER STORIES
Robert Shapard’s exquisitely crafted short stories take readers to enchantingly peculiar realms: A young girl poignantly rejects immortality in favor of love. A startling revelation confronts a son who discovers his father’s head is only burlap with piercing Marks-A-Lot eyes. A couple in their early 30s engage in sex role-play involving the destruction of Mars. A young woman valet parker at an all-night diner in Los Angeles is ensnared by the world’s most famous monster. A boy’s life is irrevocably altered by witnessing a Mexican family’s farm-truck accident. An old, hungover science professor imparts the Earth’s greatest secret to his students.
Robert Shapard’s exquisitely crafted short stories take readers to enchantingly peculiar realms: A young girl poignantly rejects immortality in favor of love. A startling revelation confronts a son who discovers his father’s head is only burlap with piercing Marks-A-Lot eyes. A couple in their early 30s engage in sex role-play involving the destruction of Mars. A young woman valet parker at an all-night diner in Los Angeles is ensnared by the world’s most famous monster. A boy’s life is irrevocably altered by witnessing a Mexican family’s farm-truck accident. An old, hungover science professor imparts the Earth’s greatest secret to his students. The stories are not merely an escape into the surreal but also delve into the human experience. Interwoven throughout is the delicate balance between mortality and love, the intersection of reality and fantasy, the transformative power of unexpected events, and the perennial quest for meaning. The compelling and thought-provoking collection beckons readers to explore the depths of their own existence and embrace the extraordinary within the ordinary.
- Regal House Publishing
- Paperback
- February 2025
- 128 Pages
- 9781646035328
Buy the Book
$18.95
About Robert Shapard
Robert Shapard co-created and edited many of the well-known W.W. Norton flash and sudden fiction anthologies. His own stories, mostly very short and a few longer, have won awards and appeared in many literary magazines. Bare Ana and Other Stories is his first collection.
Praise
“I loved every story. A remarkable collection.” —Meg Pokrass, author of The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories
“An impressive collection, like an introduction to flash fictions.” —Elizabeth Harris, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award and the Gival Press Novel Award, author of Three Lives of a Woman
“I love how these stories seem to configure doors and windows that open onto scenes we recognize from some deep part of our souls and then go places we would never have imagined.” —Christopher Merrill, author of On the Road to Lviv, director of University of Iowa International Writing Program
“A pitch-perfect, masterfully wrought collection of fiction short in length but vast in the Big Bang of the human condition. Bare Ana and Other Stories is a work that will enchant in the reading and will endure in the reader for long, long after.” —Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Late City
“Robert Shapard co-edited Sudden Fiction, an anthology that predated the term flash fiction, and had a ground-breaking effect on the current lay of American short fiction. It’s welcome now to have Bare Ana and Other Stories, a compelling collection of his own work. These artfully concise stories are stamped with a sense of American place, and set at intersections where the workaday world collides with illumination. There’s an ache of the sensual from subtle detail seen freshly enough to elevate the prose, as it does in ‘Cardinals,’ a story about a couple in a long marriage, in which a line reads ‘there were still bra strap indentations in her skin that stirred him.’ Were Shapard a pianist, he’d be a musician praised for the beauty of his delicate touch.” —Stuart Dybek, author of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern, winner of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Malamud Award