The four chapbooks collected in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness revel in the succinctness of their form. Three of them finalists and one of them the winner of the first annual short short chapbook contest held by Rose Metal Press, each author explores the underlying tension anchored beneath each story of 1,000 words or less. These stories are peculiar; they resonate with restlessness. They are deft, they are gritty, and they are lyrical. Laughter, Applause. Laughter, Music, Applause by Kathy Fish, Wanting by Amy L. Clark, Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix by Elizabeth Ellen, and The Sky Is a Well by Claudia Smith combine four multi-layered portrayals of beautiful uneasiness into a collection rich with wit, grace, and originality. With an introduction by Pia Z. Ehrhardt.
Amy L. Clark is an assistant professor of college composition at Pine Manor College. She has had fiction published in several literary journals, including Juked, Quick Fiction, and Fringe, and her work appears in the anthology Brevity & Echo. She has always secretly wanted to be an astronaut.
Elizabeth Ellen is the author of Before You She Was a Pit Bull (Future Tense). Her stories have been published in a wide variety of print and online journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Spork, Pindeldyboz, The Insomniac Reader (Manic D), The Guardian, Quick Fiction, and Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney's Humor, and have received nominations for The Million Writers Award as well as a Notable Mention in The Best American Nonrequired Reader (2002). She lives in Ann Arbor and is Deputy Editor of Hobart.
Kathy Fish has published over eighty stories both online and in print. Recent work is published or is forthcoming in Quick Fiction, Smokelong Quarterly, Night Train, Spork, [sic] literary journal, Denver Quarterly, FRiGG, Storyglossia, New South and elsewhere. Four of her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Claudia Smith lives in San Antonio, Texas with her husband and son. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her fiction has appeared in Redivider, The Mississippi Review online, Juked, Night Train, Elimae, and Sou'wester, among others. Her stories have been anthologized in Norton's New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond and So New Media's Consumed: Women on Excess.
