The Book

Title: The Unauthorized Biography of Michele Bachmann (and other stories)

Genre: Fiction, short stories

Publisher: Brew City Press, 2011

Kindle Price: $2.99
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Print Edition: $10.00
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ISBN-13: 978-1467974370
ISBN-10: 1467974374

A white man lost in Darfur. Phone hackers. Honey thieves. An Iraq War veteran searching for his missing leg in the dead of night. These are just a few of the characters inhabiting Ken Brosky’s first short story collection, which features short stories that have been published in magazines including Gargoyle, Cream City Review, Barcelona Review, Pif, and more. If there’s one theme running through all of the stories, it’s survival. Every character approaches this theme in a different way. For the couple stuck inside a coffee shop during the Apocalypse, “survival” means getting through the next hour. For the middle-aged man who fears he might be downsized, it means going out on your own terms. How do you survive? Will you?

From Kirkus reviews:

Brosky’s darkly witty stories describe the major and mundane problems facing ordinary Midwesterners.

The young and youngish, mostly male, characters in Brosky’s stories find their personal, self-devised method for dealing with the world challenged by what life throws their way. The protagonist of “Deer Tales” impulsively stakes a major decision—whether to move back to his hometown or stay in the city and pursue a career as an artist—on his success at playing a deer-hunting video game in the lobby bar of a Holiday Inn, only to find that he’s terrible at it … In the best stories, Brosky exploits this disconnect with a sharp eye for detail and a fine sense of absurdity that’s both darkly funny and subtly tragic, as when one of the Four Horsemen pulls up to a Wisconsin coffee bar for a double shot of espresso in “Apocolypse Wow!” The preconceptions the story’s characters have about the End Times, whether credulous or skeptical, fail to prepare them for the grimly underwhelming, almost bureaucratic nature of the disaster they face. The polite, apologetic Horseman doesn’t have many answers to give the anxious baristas, just weary resignation, a presence that wilts vegetation and a golden scale he has no idea what to do with …

These stories about often-overlooked characters find sharp observations on the indignities of modern life.

From Susan Russo Anderson of self-publishing review:

A great read, often moving, The Unauthorized Biography of Michele Bachmann (And Other Stories), by Ken Brosky is a collection of ten short stories and one essay. The writing is true, the voice unique, the stories, literary gems.

Except for the title story, all works have been previously published. The list of their publications is impressive—The Barcelona Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, Gargoyle Magazine, Pif, Cream City Review, and others.

Reading this book gave me my own journey.

Not content with the proffered PDF*, I bought the book on Amazon because I wanted to experience the ebook the way most readers would, so I downloaded it to a Kindle and began.

After reading the author’s comments on the copyright page and his directorial previews, I told myself I had reached into the bag and dredged up the scribbles of yet another tongue-in-cheek turk.

Then I began to read the stories. They quickly burned away my jealous misgivings. I read them in one sitting, unable to put the book down. This collection is a tour de force by an author with a powerful, unique voice.

This book contains short stories that were published in the following literary journals:

Gargoyle

Predicate Literary Journal

Cream City Review

Barcelona Review

Keep Going

Santa Fe Writers Project

Pif Magazine

Jersey Devil Press

Bartleby Snopes