Edge of Our Lives
by Mark Rich

Trade paperback, 4.75 x 6.5, 272pp
ISBN 9781892619112
$10.00
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Rating: IC (mature themes, mild violence, surreal scenarios)

I have known quiet nights. None so quiet as this. Blue light. Amber glow atop an unsteady steel pole. A breeze, a fog: hands, feet, tendrils, eyes, even pale lips whisper by. I keep my appointment. In the growing dark, even in a near dead city, I take comfort from the nearness of everything. The buildings creep near. The trees hang low. The rumbling of a ghostly car across the square becomes a murmur in the ear. Even the street itself, growing damp, rises to scrape the chin, while my feet, impossibly divorced form the rest of me, move through the earth itself. I feel connected. Not to myself. Connected to the dusk and the cement, the trees and the glistening window panes, the lamps and the smells of damp and rust...

This collection of new and previously published short stories spans the width of Mark's considerable range of voices and themes. From the deeply poetic to the wryly humorous to the just plain bizarre, the stories take the reader to the edges (and depths) of the human (and inhuman) experience.

Reviews and Comments:

"Rich writes like a combination of James Thurber and Franz Kafka, evoking ruefully comic domestic situations that partake of the essential absurdity of the universe and human strivings."
         -- Paul DiFilippo, Asimov's SF

"Mark Rich is a unique stylist...One might venture to say that, rather than following the beat of a different drummer, Mark Rich follows the beat of a mind-bending psychedelic alien instrument that cannot be safely named."
        -- Magic Realism