Glass Animals

by  Stephen V. Ramey

170 pages – paperback originally published January 2013

paperback ISBN:  978-1-925101-86-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-925101-87-4   /   Kindle ISBN:   978-0-9922778-1-9

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what people are saying about Glass Animals

Stephen V. Ramey’s Glass Animals offers an intimate look at a matador’s passion and pain, a bus driver’s brush with mortality, a jilted lover’s dilemma, a disfigured boy who “inhales” his salvation, and a young man hounded by glass animals in a pool. Ramey takes on the richness of his characters’ emotional and physical torment and delivers something morbidly fascinating and keen. A great first collection!

Kristine Ong Muslim, author of We Bury the Landscape and Grim Series

 

Stephen V. Ramey captivates and mesmerizes his readers, taking us by the hand into the hidden worlds of people not unknown to us. His instincts are visceral, perceived, radiating a power and compassion that guides us inside each of his characters. Ramey’s collection explores the human condition. Ramey is the real thing. Read him!

Meg Tuite, author of Domestic Apparition

 

“Gravity was another rule on another sign he could not read,” Malcolm, the protagonist in the title story from Steven V. Ramey’s wonderful collection thinks. In this gravity-defying display of mostly flash pieces, Ramey leaps and dances over the domestic and the surreal, the mundane and the magical. He seamlessly weaves a crazy-quilt of characters who – despite being a little lost and befuddled by the world – have moments of chandelier insight into their own human hearts. Reminiscent of Raymond Carver’s Little Things and Kim Chinquee’s Oh Baby, Glass Animals is a work of sparkling vision and compressed and surprising language – all put to work to reveal a world where everything’s at stake.

Lori Jakiela, author of Miss New York Has Everything and Spot the Terrorist

 

In his collection Glass Animals, Stephen V. Ramey delivers a collection of short fiction that at once engages, bewilders, and elevates the form to a new space. Ramey gets under the skin of his characters to present the reader with a spectacular journey through the four quartets that make up the collection: Reflect, Refract, Reveal, Distort. Each story is the equivalent of looking at the world through a kaleidoscope and the shattered, glittering stories that make up this collection are exceptional. St. Peter’s Penis, has stayed with me since I first read it last year, and along with Sacred in this Light is one of the stand-out pieces of flash fiction I’ve had the pleasure to read. Ramey weaves his stories with assuredness and assiduity, and is a voice to be reckoned with.

James Claffey

 

I think this collection is actually a novel in which the unknown author goes slowly and irretrievably insane. Each section he gets farther from the innocent boy, and the realistic but nutty Cee Cee, and begins to see through the glass darkly.

Mary Martitia Rucker, from her Foreword to Glass Animals

 

read a review of Glass Animals at The Internet Review of Books

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