The Girl with Two Left Breasts

(Paperback)

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The stories in The Girl with Two Left Breasts focus on a new generation of African-Americans, who, having had access to the education their parents could only dream of, now face the challenges of living in an insane postmodern world. Readers will encounter stories shaped and styled for the new millennium as image and metaphor are taffy-stret

Reviews

"D.V. Glenn's fictions explore wondrous worlds of wordplay, but do so, as does all the best innovative writing, in the service of the human heart rather than as mere showcase for erudite technical pyrotechnics. His work reminds me of the best music of Jimi Hendrix, which, despite its dazzling and dynamic derring-do, has the power to humble one's feelings and elicit empathy, sympathy, and even sociopathy in arresting and original ways. Glenn's investigations into the nature of the father-son relationship ("My Father's Penis"), the consciousness of the killer in the self ("Serial Killer Museum"), the love of a pimp for a 14-year-old hooker ("Chantelle"), the relative humanity of a so-called 'Superman' ("Kewl Kryptonian"), a student's need to graduate high school at all costs even if that means submitting to a pedophile teacher ("The English Teacher's Pupil"), the difference between dreams of academic success and the reality of tough life ("Shot in the Head"), and ten more such investigations into the same blue underbelly of society that fascinated Hendrix are powerful and emotive. As solid as the subject matter is, though, it is the skill of the teller that sets these fictions apart from most others. I'm pretty sure D.V. Glenn writes these things behind his back and with his teeth and then sets them on fire. Wow."

--Eckhard Gerdes, author of My Landlady the Lobotomist

"D.V. Glenn's writings are ignored at great peril."

--Don Davis, composer of The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions

"Savagely ironic and boldly imaginative, D.V. Glenn's unique collection of farflung tales delivers moments of intoxicating beauty and sobering ugliness. These fictions challenge the things we hold sacred with the killer instinct and deft hand of our best satirists."

--Josh Pyror, author of Monkey in the Middle

"When the post-Carver short story declared war on interiority and elaboration, someone failed to notify D.V. Glenn. He loans his hallucinatory and fecund style to characters who find themselves in scenes one imagines would have been limned by Dostoevsky's, Kafka's and Ralph Ellison's narrators, had they survived into the period we blithely call 'postmodern.' Glenn's stories are united by a mixture of lucidity and the sobering humor that unites memorable moments in stories written by Phillip Roth and Sherman Alexie, moments born of the exhaustion that comes from fighting the good fight."

--Zoran Kuzmanvich, Professor of English, Editor, Nabokov Studies

Author Bio

Daryl V. Glenn is a graduate from the University of Wisconsin with an MA in Creative Writing; as a graduate student, he was awarded the Mae E. Gales Literary Award for short fiction. He is the winner of HEArts (Human Equity Through the Arts) annual fiction-writing contest and has been a Pushcart Prize nominee. His fiction has appeared in a number of journals. The Girl with Two Left Breasts is his first book.