The Old Man and the Bird and Other Fictions: [Pleasant and Unpleasant]: Collection of Novellas & One-Act Plays

Six dark fictions with a cosmic scope and a delirious immediacy, these shorter pieces (2 novellas and 4 one-acts) are an aspect of Swartz's gift many will find welcome, others hugely unsettling. The Old Man and the Bird,the concluding sequence of a befuddled Harry Ricci, could be taken as a ?neo-conservatively-grotesque? parable. From there it is a short stroll to Burt Spew in ?Snappers,? a madcap Armageddon of its own and parody of ?Jaws.' We have as well such oddities as ?The Damnation of Winston Pollock,? the saga of a disgruntled software wizard; ?The Gift Horse and the Gift,? the comic swan song of a disaffected shooter; ?Off the Record,? the threnody of ?a pedophilic trans-racial hip hop? composer; and ?Clippers,? the outcry of a small-town American sub-literate, a latter-day, testosterone-laden barber ?waiting for [his] Godot.' All told, these tales are abundant reminder that it was possible to laugh before 9/11, and to chuckle, even roar, long after, en route to our current Abu Ghraibs or Guantanamos.Swartz, David is the author of 'The Old Man and the Bird and Other Fictions: [Pleasant and Unpleasant]: Collection of Novellas & One-Act Plays', published 2006 under ISBN 9780595416295 and ISBN 0595416292.