CLIMATE STRANGE
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A hiker stumbles upon a secret waterfall in the woods. A desperate father tries to get his family to enjoy a game of Jenga. A housecleaning robot goes berserk. Miss Senior Massachusetts dances with an elephant. A clown cult comes to town. Dogs walk their owners. Everyone gets a popcorn machine. Cancer is cured by mistake. A sasquatch attempts to jump a canyon on a motorcycle. A neighbor blasts the ionosphere from his yard. Climate Strange is a cracked funhouse mirror with the shards fallen and reflecting all of the crazy wonders of the new now.
Publisher: Astrophil Press ISBN: 978-1-960780-08-9 Publication Date: 5/15/2026 208 Pages |
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR CLIMATE STRANGE
“Climate Strange is a party, and your friends are there. These brief lucid pieces bring to mind Lydia Davis and Karl Ove Knausgård mingling on the set of a new western filmed in the Mall of America, except in Norway—now a country run by an Oulipo government. The point: get there quick.”
—Nora Lange, author of Us Fools and Day Care
“Climate Strange is another wild, powerful duet album from Ridge and Bosworth, two flash fiction American masters. Each story howls with life and laughter. A sucker punch right to the heart. With echoes of James Tate, Donald Barthelme, and Italo Calvino, Climate Strange rises to the occasion of our strange times and leaves the reader breathlessly alive. A full-tilt joyride for the soul, wonderfully weird and dangerously beautiful.”
—Michael Bible, author of Sophia and The Terrible
“Climate Strange is a party, and your friends are there. These brief lucid pieces bring to mind Lydia Davis and Karl Ove Knausgård mingling on the set of a new western filmed in the Mall of America, except in Norway—now a country run by an Oulipo government. The point: get there quick.”
—Nora Lange, author of Us Fools and Day Care
“Climate Strange is another wild, powerful duet album from Ridge and Bosworth, two flash fiction American masters. Each story howls with life and laughter. A sucker punch right to the heart. With echoes of James Tate, Donald Barthelme, and Italo Calvino, Climate Strange rises to the occasion of our strange times and leaves the reader breathlessly alive. A full-tilt joyride for the soul, wonderfully weird and dangerously beautiful.”
—Michael Bible, author of Sophia and The Terrible
MORE PRAISE
“Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth’s collection of coordinated tandem shenanigans provides its reader with a series of dispatches from a realm so absurd it rivals our own. In an era when it’s easy to confuse satire for reality, The Onion for The Washington Post, we need a book like this one to put things in perspective, to give us a way to laugh at ourselves while absorbing the gut punch of how strange our lives can seem when seen through the twin lenses of two vibrant imaginations.”
—Christopher Kennedy, author of Stealing Marquee Moon
“It seems like every week nowadays is a weird week, but not good weird. These pieces are good weird—eccentric and surreal and ready to turn on a dime or even on a penny, funny and insane, but with a deep and sometimes grim human core.”
—Brian Evenson, World Fantasy Award and Shirley Jackson Award winner.
“Bosworth and Ridge seek to unsettle the world. They roughen language, making it stark and beautiful and marvelously uneven. They challenge our conception of reality. This world is terrible and wonderful.”
—J.I. Daniels, author of Mount Fugue and If You Can
“Climate Strange should come with a hernia-via-laughter warning. Please check into the quality of your insurance, and the quality of your abdominal musculature, before reading these pugilists-of-wit pages.”
—Abraham Smith, author of Destruction of Man and Surgencies
“Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth have produced the most perfect weird book. Are these dreams? Fantasias? Postcards from a parallel universe? It doesn’t matter, because they’re so absorbing and funny and sad and good they deserve to just exist without category, to be read without anything but delight.”
—Amber Sparks, author of Happy People Don’t Live Here
“Climate Strange, a collaborative collection of fiction written by Mel Bosworth and Ryan Ridge, guides us into snapshots—glimpses of a world full of frontiers. These stories feel like taking a walk in a neighborhood and looking through the windows of each house as we stroll by, witnessing the bizarre grounded in reality. Lynchian at times, maybe Bradburyian, but with its own distinctive tones and narratives where we play spectacle to zombie unicorns, the ghost of Babe Ruth, and all else not in between. Bosworth and Ridge write with pinpoint mastery—revealing the true nature and purpose of literature. Strange, indeed.”
—Shome Dasgupta, author of Cajun South Brown Folk
—Christopher Kennedy, author of Stealing Marquee Moon
“It seems like every week nowadays is a weird week, but not good weird. These pieces are good weird—eccentric and surreal and ready to turn on a dime or even on a penny, funny and insane, but with a deep and sometimes grim human core.”
—Brian Evenson, World Fantasy Award and Shirley Jackson Award winner.
“Bosworth and Ridge seek to unsettle the world. They roughen language, making it stark and beautiful and marvelously uneven. They challenge our conception of reality. This world is terrible and wonderful.”
—J.I. Daniels, author of Mount Fugue and If You Can
“Climate Strange should come with a hernia-via-laughter warning. Please check into the quality of your insurance, and the quality of your abdominal musculature, before reading these pugilists-of-wit pages.”
—Abraham Smith, author of Destruction of Man and Surgencies
“Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth have produced the most perfect weird book. Are these dreams? Fantasias? Postcards from a parallel universe? It doesn’t matter, because they’re so absorbing and funny and sad and good they deserve to just exist without category, to be read without anything but delight.”
—Amber Sparks, author of Happy People Don’t Live Here
“Climate Strange, a collaborative collection of fiction written by Mel Bosworth and Ryan Ridge, guides us into snapshots—glimpses of a world full of frontiers. These stories feel like taking a walk in a neighborhood and looking through the windows of each house as we stroll by, witnessing the bizarre grounded in reality. Lynchian at times, maybe Bradburyian, but with its own distinctive tones and narratives where we play spectacle to zombie unicorns, the ghost of Babe Ruth, and all else not in between. Bosworth and Ridge write with pinpoint mastery—revealing the true nature and purpose of literature. Strange, indeed.”
—Shome Dasgupta, author of Cajun South Brown Folk
OX
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Using mostly two letters and a handful of glyphs, the micropoems in Ryan Ridge’s Ox are more than an experiment in minimalism: They are a story that takes on a life of its own—the life of Ox, a creature of two letters who manages between birth and death to watch porn, take up boxing, become a doctor, go to Hollywood, get in trouble with the FBI, and transcend beyond his own self, all while keeping within a tiny frame of space. Too clever to be strapped into any harness, Ridge’s signature oddball style meets a hybrid margin between poetics and storytelling that both defies and defines genre. The reader is steered into a micro memoir where the visual expanses and spatial mapping are as intricate as any metered verse, repeating its own rhythm until the effect of two small letters becomes nearly hallucinogenic.
Publisher: Alternating Current Press ISBN: 978-1946580306 Publication Date: 11/30/2021 78 Pages |
PRAISE FOR OX
"What a good idea and execution of a good idea OX is."
—David Berman, author of Actual Air
“On the page, Ryan Ridge is pure pleasure—a perpetual-motion machine of poems that you see rather than read. His new book is an unmuzzled ox that recalls the minimalist poetry of Aram Saroyan, freshly retooled for the 21st century. Recommended!”
—Mike Topp, Author of 29 Mini-Essays and The Frontier Index
"What a good idea and execution of a good idea OX is."
—David Berman, author of Actual Air
“On the page, Ryan Ridge is pure pleasure—a perpetual-motion machine of poems that you see rather than read. His new book is an unmuzzled ox that recalls the minimalist poetry of Aram Saroyan, freshly retooled for the 21st century. Recommended!”
—Mike Topp, Author of 29 Mini-Essays and The Frontier Index
MORE PRAISE
“In the beginning, there was OX. If not the animal, then the elemental circle and cross: our earliest typographical fusion of language and physical technology—and perhaps the stuff of civilization itself. After all, what would a wheel be without its spokes, and where would we be without either? In Ox, Ryan Ridge puts this storied rubber to the road and arrives by way of Aram Saroyan’s adventures in minimalism at some seriously delightful poems. From tic-tac-toe to Paul Bunyan’s bummed-out beast of burden, Ox takes us through the lifecycle of language—birth to death to resurrection—and proves that if the goal of poetry is to infuse every word with its atomic weight, then Ridge’s work here is downright nucleic.”
—Adam O. Davis, Author of Index of Haunted Houses and Pyrrhic Symphony
“Ox is concrete poetry as only Ryan Ridge could give us. Part Oulipian antic, part hero’s journey, these spare, inventive, wacky permutations are pure chef’s x.”
—Kristen Renee Miller, Translator of Spawn and Heating the Outdoors
“Using only two letters, Ryan Ridge demonstrates how the spatial dimension of poetry connects emotionally to readers with the same tenacity as rhythm, rhyme, and diction. Uh, that’s fucking nuts. Each poem feels as if it entered the world fully formed.”
—Jennifer L. Knox, Author of Crushing It
“Ryan Ridge’s Ox follows the same path paved by Aram Saroyan. However, instead of lighght, Ridge gives us a character named Ox, who, among other things, gets ghosted, dresses up for Halloween, and wins the big game. Ox is more proof that Ridge is one of the most inventive, playfully weird minds writing today.”
—Noah Falck, Author of Exclusions
—Adam O. Davis, Author of Index of Haunted Houses and Pyrrhic Symphony
“Ox is concrete poetry as only Ryan Ridge could give us. Part Oulipian antic, part hero’s journey, these spare, inventive, wacky permutations are pure chef’s x.”
—Kristen Renee Miller, Translator of Spawn and Heating the Outdoors
“Using only two letters, Ryan Ridge demonstrates how the spatial dimension of poetry connects emotionally to readers with the same tenacity as rhythm, rhyme, and diction. Uh, that’s fucking nuts. Each poem feels as if it entered the world fully formed.”
—Jennifer L. Knox, Author of Crushing It
“Ryan Ridge’s Ox follows the same path paved by Aram Saroyan. However, instead of lighght, Ridge gives us a character named Ox, who, among other things, gets ghosted, dresses up for Halloween, and wins the big game. Ox is more proof that Ridge is one of the most inventive, playfully weird minds writing today.”
—Noah Falck, Author of Exclusions
NEW BAD NEWS
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2018 Winner of the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature
2016 Excerpt won the Calvino Prize for Fabulist Fiction Lit Hub, “10 Story Collections You May Have Missed in May” Southwest Review, "10 Must-Read Books of 2020" Chicago Review of Books, "10 Small Press Story Collections You Might Have Missed" Southern Review of Books, “The Best Southern Books of May 2020” CRAFT, “New Books: May 2020” The Quivering Pen, “Fresh Ink: March 2020 Edition” In New Bad News, the frenetic and far-out worlds of fading celebrities, failed festival promoters, underemployed adjuncts, and overly aware chatbots collide. A Terminator statue comes to life at the Hollywood Wax Museum; a coyote laps up Colt 45, as a passerby looks on in existential quietude; a detective disappears while investigating a missing midwestern cam girl. Set in Kentucky, Hollywood, and the afterlife, these bright, bold short-shorts and stories construct an uncannily familiar, alternate-reality America. Publisher: Sarabande Books ISBN: 978-1-946448-56-9 Publication Date: 5/19/2020 180 Pages |
PRAISE FOR NEW BAD NEWS
“Ryan Ridge’s verbal prestidigitation suggest a more rueful Mark Leyner, and he can make you both laugh and wince, but he can also kick up your pulse with a storytelling urgency that thrums under the attractively fragmented surfaces. His hard-boiled punchlines are rooted in geography and yearning and real American sadness.”
—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Feral Detective
“New Bad News reminds me of Barry Hannah had he written a collection of short-short fiction. One of the most remarkable things about this collection is Ryan Ridge’s ability to carve a lot into a very small space, which is what makes his work so unusual, so funny, and so smart. His prose is both beautiful and raw. I loved this book.”
—Brandon Hobson, National Book Award Finalist and author of Where the Dead Sit Talking
“Ryan Ridge’s verbal prestidigitation suggest a more rueful Mark Leyner, and he can make you both laugh and wince, but he can also kick up your pulse with a storytelling urgency that thrums under the attractively fragmented surfaces. His hard-boiled punchlines are rooted in geography and yearning and real American sadness.”
—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Feral Detective
“New Bad News reminds me of Barry Hannah had he written a collection of short-short fiction. One of the most remarkable things about this collection is Ryan Ridge’s ability to carve a lot into a very small space, which is what makes his work so unusual, so funny, and so smart. His prose is both beautiful and raw. I loved this book.”
—Brandon Hobson, National Book Award Finalist and author of Where the Dead Sit Talking
MORE PRAISE
"Ridge offers a new collection of stories, reminiscences, fragments, and fables that are firmly in his wheelhouse of finding whimsical humor in the everyday world. . . . [U]npredictable postmodern jests with more than a little pathos underneath the levity."
— Kirkus Reviews
"[Ridge] expresses a distinctly American voice reaching out of myriad pop-culture remnants. . . . [and] creates a gallery of enigmatic oddities that will enchant readers of poetry and experimental literature."
— Booklist
"We owe a debt of gratitude to the Louisville, Kentucky-based Sarabande Books for swooning and selecting Ridge’s story collection New Bad News as the fourteenth annual publication in the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature. The collection deftly counterbalances flash fiction as brief as a single well-stocked sentence with lengthier pieces, escalating with fever dream pacing into pop-culture-laden experimental explorations of Americana and narrative itself."
—"Ryan Ridge’s New Bad News Upends the Familiar,” Southern Review of Books
"Plenty of anonymous people populate these pieces, but Ridge includes the famous, too: Jackson Browne, Charlie Chaplin, Elliott Smith, Arnold Schwarzenegger. For someone raised in Kentucky who lives in Salt Lake City he knows a lot about California’s demons and dreams; the five sentence 'Echo Park' and its follow-on 'Echoes of Echo Park' reverberate (sorry) with La-La Land longing."
—“10 Story Collections You May Have Missed in May,” Lit Hub
"The latest release from Sarabande’s Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature, New Bad News is like an anarchic Twitter feed run amok, full of feverish absurdities and off-kilter pop-culture references. With neon-buzzing prose, Ryan Ridge captures an America of wax figure museums and cam girls, the characters within lurching like Frankenstein’s monster towards a clarity that remains forever out of reach."
—"10 Small Press Story Collections You Might Have Missed," Chicago Review of Books
“Everything awaits inside, kitchen sink leak synth included: the quickest wit in the West; tinsel town’s hissing mirages; dreams deeply American; cheap beer good and cold; downbursts of social commentary; scalpel-fine finessing of the human condition; wisdoms poached and wisdoms boiled and wisdoms deviled and wisdoms parboiled. Readers are encouraged to keep a cry-laugh hankie very, very handy.”
—"10 Must-Read Books of 2020" by Abraham Smith, Southwest Review
"New Bad News can’t be pared down into simple bits. It contains humor and pathos and wit and word games and characters you root for and some you root against. It sits at its own table. Sips on its juice and gnaws on its Snickers while the rest of us try to figure out what makes it so damn cool."
—"WE HAVE TO GET COMFORTABLE BEING OURSELVES: AN INTERVIEW WITH RYAN RIDGE" by Gene Kwak, Adroit Journal
“Packed with soul-pathos and crackpot humor, Ridge’s latest is a must-read for our times. In fact, you might call this one downright prophetic. Everything awaits inside, kitchen sink leak synth included: the quickest wit in the West; tinsel town’s hissing mirages; dreams deeply American; cheap beer good and cold; downbursts or social commentary; scalpel-fine finessing of the human condition; wisdoms poached and wisdoms boiled and wisdoms deviled and wisdoms parboiled. Readers are encouraged to keep a cry-laugh hankie very, very handy.”
—“Tectonic Punchlines: A Conversation with Ryan Ridge,” Southwest Review
“New Bad News is a box of absolute treasures—funny, wise, full of surprises but instantly familiar. This fantastic book is one I’ll come back to.”
—Ramona Ausubel, author of Awayland and A Guide to Being Born
“New Bad News is tenderness and mordancy awash with California moonlight and Kentucky ghosts too. Ryan Ridge’s strange transmissions glow like buzzing neon in the dim and make us feel less weird and alone. This! This is a book of brilliant, zappy echoes we can touch.”
—Leesa Cross-Smith, author of Every Kiss A War, Whiskey & Ribbons, and So We Can Glow
“Ryan Ridge’s short short stories carry a sort of essence of the 21st century. His brief prose style parallels with our abrupt, social-media-driven way of communicating in the modern world. His tales capture the dark tensions behind everything from climate change to Charlie Chaplin tramp stamps.”
— Autre Magazine
— Kirkus Reviews
"[Ridge] expresses a distinctly American voice reaching out of myriad pop-culture remnants. . . . [and] creates a gallery of enigmatic oddities that will enchant readers of poetry and experimental literature."
— Booklist
"We owe a debt of gratitude to the Louisville, Kentucky-based Sarabande Books for swooning and selecting Ridge’s story collection New Bad News as the fourteenth annual publication in the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature. The collection deftly counterbalances flash fiction as brief as a single well-stocked sentence with lengthier pieces, escalating with fever dream pacing into pop-culture-laden experimental explorations of Americana and narrative itself."
—"Ryan Ridge’s New Bad News Upends the Familiar,” Southern Review of Books
"Plenty of anonymous people populate these pieces, but Ridge includes the famous, too: Jackson Browne, Charlie Chaplin, Elliott Smith, Arnold Schwarzenegger. For someone raised in Kentucky who lives in Salt Lake City he knows a lot about California’s demons and dreams; the five sentence 'Echo Park' and its follow-on 'Echoes of Echo Park' reverberate (sorry) with La-La Land longing."
—“10 Story Collections You May Have Missed in May,” Lit Hub
"The latest release from Sarabande’s Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature, New Bad News is like an anarchic Twitter feed run amok, full of feverish absurdities and off-kilter pop-culture references. With neon-buzzing prose, Ryan Ridge captures an America of wax figure museums and cam girls, the characters within lurching like Frankenstein’s monster towards a clarity that remains forever out of reach."
—"10 Small Press Story Collections You Might Have Missed," Chicago Review of Books
“Everything awaits inside, kitchen sink leak synth included: the quickest wit in the West; tinsel town’s hissing mirages; dreams deeply American; cheap beer good and cold; downbursts of social commentary; scalpel-fine finessing of the human condition; wisdoms poached and wisdoms boiled and wisdoms deviled and wisdoms parboiled. Readers are encouraged to keep a cry-laugh hankie very, very handy.”
—"10 Must-Read Books of 2020" by Abraham Smith, Southwest Review
"New Bad News can’t be pared down into simple bits. It contains humor and pathos and wit and word games and characters you root for and some you root against. It sits at its own table. Sips on its juice and gnaws on its Snickers while the rest of us try to figure out what makes it so damn cool."
—"WE HAVE TO GET COMFORTABLE BEING OURSELVES: AN INTERVIEW WITH RYAN RIDGE" by Gene Kwak, Adroit Journal
“Packed with soul-pathos and crackpot humor, Ridge’s latest is a must-read for our times. In fact, you might call this one downright prophetic. Everything awaits inside, kitchen sink leak synth included: the quickest wit in the West; tinsel town’s hissing mirages; dreams deeply American; cheap beer good and cold; downbursts or social commentary; scalpel-fine finessing of the human condition; wisdoms poached and wisdoms boiled and wisdoms deviled and wisdoms parboiled. Readers are encouraged to keep a cry-laugh hankie very, very handy.”
—“Tectonic Punchlines: A Conversation with Ryan Ridge,” Southwest Review
“New Bad News is a box of absolute treasures—funny, wise, full of surprises but instantly familiar. This fantastic book is one I’ll come back to.”
—Ramona Ausubel, author of Awayland and A Guide to Being Born
“New Bad News is tenderness and mordancy awash with California moonlight and Kentucky ghosts too. Ryan Ridge’s strange transmissions glow like buzzing neon in the dim and make us feel less weird and alone. This! This is a book of brilliant, zappy echoes we can touch.”
—Leesa Cross-Smith, author of Every Kiss A War, Whiskey & Ribbons, and So We Can Glow
“Ryan Ridge’s short short stories carry a sort of essence of the 21st century. His brief prose style parallels with our abrupt, social-media-driven way of communicating in the modern world. His tales capture the dark tensions behind everything from climate change to Charlie Chaplin tramp stamps.”
— Autre Magazine
SECOND ACTS IN AMERICAN LIVES
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Equal parts prose-poems, flash stories, riddles, and mythological prologues to the lives of spent Americans—struggling, murderous, born again, drug-addled, sexual, hopeful, despairing, soaring—this collection stands on the edge of genre definition and questions what it means to be at the cusp of living. Punchlines, plays on words, dad puns, and yo’ mama jokes straddle the saddle with deep metaphorical lessons on society today, making companions of dark humor and serious wit. A séance of poetics and politics, this collection of glimpses into the disheveled and desperate, the cerebral and celebrated, the gangly and glorious, conjures what it is to be American in a society as stupid as it is terrifying.
Illustrated throughout by artist Jacob Heustis. Publisher: Alternating Current Press ISBN: 978-1946580030 Publication Date: 2/5/2018 178 Pages |
PRAISE FOR SECOND ACTS IN AMERICAN LIVES
“From precocious Buddhas to out-of-control vehicles, Ridge and Bosworth will take you on their own unique, highly experimental but effectual journey. You can’t help but enjoy exploring the very short form with these two creative minds and marvel at how they bring out the best in each other.”
—Tara Lynn Masih, Founding series editor of Best Small Fictions
“Antic, exuberant, and full of surprise, almost every sentence ends on a note of provocative mystery, pointing toward the pregnant darkness where David Berman disappeared. These brief, jagged stories are punky, druggy, and beautifully poetic. They’ll take you on a warp-speed ramble through an America that’s died and come back and died again, getting stranger and punchier every time. Why fear the coming apocalypse if it’s this much fun?”
—David Leo Rice, Author of A Room in Dodge City and The Berlin Wall
“From precocious Buddhas to out-of-control vehicles, Ridge and Bosworth will take you on their own unique, highly experimental but effectual journey. You can’t help but enjoy exploring the very short form with these two creative minds and marvel at how they bring out the best in each other.”
—Tara Lynn Masih, Founding series editor of Best Small Fictions
“Antic, exuberant, and full of surprise, almost every sentence ends on a note of provocative mystery, pointing toward the pregnant darkness where David Berman disappeared. These brief, jagged stories are punky, druggy, and beautifully poetic. They’ll take you on a warp-speed ramble through an America that’s died and come back and died again, getting stranger and punchier every time. Why fear the coming apocalypse if it’s this much fun?”
—David Leo Rice, Author of A Room in Dodge City and The Berlin Wall
MORE PRAISE
“Short fiction from two masters of the form.”
— Nerve
“Ranging from short to super-duper short, the prose-poetic stories in Ryan Ridge’s and Mel Bosworth’s Second Acts in American Lives zig and zag, fake and fade, keeping the reader guessing on every page, and the illustrations by Jacob Heustis are every bit as funny and surprising as the words they accompany. It’s a pinball machine of a book, full of bounce and light and crazy ricochets: sentences start, you don’t know where they’ll end up, and this dynamic unpredictability is what gives this collection its life and its victory.”
—Kathleen Rooney, Author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
“A collection of wildly imaginative capsules of surrealist Americana. The short, punchy pieces are chaotic enough to be funny and tragic enough to be heartbreaking.”
— Preview Massachusetts Magazine
“Twenty things I want to say about Mel Bosworth and Ryan Ridge: 1.) Did Poetry write these men into being? 2.) Poetry was in a weird mood. 3.) They’re good, you should know. 4.) Like really, really good. 5.) Repeat winners of Sentence of the Year. 6.) Where do they get off? 7.) Where do they get on, for that matter? 8.) Can they show other writers the place? 9.) Scratch that last question. 10.) What I was meaning to say: There should be laws against these men. 11.) Or at least a temporary injunction. 12.) It’s like, Hold on! 13.) We need to catch our breaths! 14.) We need to unpretzel our minds! 15.) Breath nets. 16.) Mind … 17.) What? 18.) Look what you’ve done to me here. 19.) Just look. 20.) See what I mean?”
—Scott Garson, Author of Is That You, John Wayne?
“Swallow this book like it’s the last cold Michelob Ultra. Read it, do a little dance, then take it out back and shoot it. Take down this book like it’s the last thing you will ever do in this life, because I’m telling you, it most likely will be. Be with this book, and I mean be with it. Is it poetry? Is it prose? Who the hell cares. Bosworth and Ridge are great literary beasts by themselves, to be read often and carefully. Together they have become one wild fucking animal. These are the real bits of us, the hidden bits and the exposed, laid out in one stunning sentence after another. I’ll always keep Second Acts in American Lives close by. I cried laughing. I have never read anything like it.”
—Ryan MacDonald, Author of The Observable Characteristics of Organisms
— Nerve
“Ranging from short to super-duper short, the prose-poetic stories in Ryan Ridge’s and Mel Bosworth’s Second Acts in American Lives zig and zag, fake and fade, keeping the reader guessing on every page, and the illustrations by Jacob Heustis are every bit as funny and surprising as the words they accompany. It’s a pinball machine of a book, full of bounce and light and crazy ricochets: sentences start, you don’t know where they’ll end up, and this dynamic unpredictability is what gives this collection its life and its victory.”
—Kathleen Rooney, Author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
“A collection of wildly imaginative capsules of surrealist Americana. The short, punchy pieces are chaotic enough to be funny and tragic enough to be heartbreaking.”
— Preview Massachusetts Magazine
“Twenty things I want to say about Mel Bosworth and Ryan Ridge: 1.) Did Poetry write these men into being? 2.) Poetry was in a weird mood. 3.) They’re good, you should know. 4.) Like really, really good. 5.) Repeat winners of Sentence of the Year. 6.) Where do they get off? 7.) Where do they get on, for that matter? 8.) Can they show other writers the place? 9.) Scratch that last question. 10.) What I was meaning to say: There should be laws against these men. 11.) Or at least a temporary injunction. 12.) It’s like, Hold on! 13.) We need to catch our breaths! 14.) We need to unpretzel our minds! 15.) Breath nets. 16.) Mind … 17.) What? 18.) Look what you’ve done to me here. 19.) Just look. 20.) See what I mean?”
—Scott Garson, Author of Is That You, John Wayne?
“Swallow this book like it’s the last cold Michelob Ultra. Read it, do a little dance, then take it out back and shoot it. Take down this book like it’s the last thing you will ever do in this life, because I’m telling you, it most likely will be. Be with this book, and I mean be with it. Is it poetry? Is it prose? Who the hell cares. Bosworth and Ridge are great literary beasts by themselves, to be read often and carefully. Together they have become one wild fucking animal. These are the real bits of us, the hidden bits and the exposed, laid out in one stunning sentence after another. I’ll always keep Second Acts in American Lives close by. I cried laughing. I have never read anything like it.”
—Ryan MacDonald, Author of The Observable Characteristics of Organisms
AMERICAN HOMES
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American Homes is a satirical exploration of the modern American home and its symbolic role in culture, identity, and society. Blending humor, wit, and sharp social commentary, the book dissects domestic spaces—attics, basements, kitchens, windows, doors, and more—while reflecting on the American dream, materialism, and suburban life. Through Ridge's playful and often absurd prose, everyday household elements become metaphors for larger societal issues, revealing the quirks, contradictions, and anxieties of contemporary life.
From the nostalgia of front porches to the hidden mysteries of basements, Ridge turns ordinary spaces into insightful meditations on homeownership, personal identity, and cultural expectations. American Homes is as much an architectural guidebook as it is a critique of consumerism, presenting a vivid portrait of how we live and the structures that define us. The result is a thought-provoking, humorous, and occasionally surreal commentary on what it means to call a place "home" in America. Illustrated throughout by artist Jacob Heustis. Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 978-0472052585 Publication Date: 12/18/2014 128 Pages |
PRAISE FOR AMERICAN HOMES
"Ryan Ridge has toppled everything. An insane and brilliant book that travels the American Home while moving ever further into the mind. What is possible in writing feels different now."
—Amina Cain, author of Creature and Indelicacy
"You want to know what I think about Ryan Ridge, the writer, the author of this great book in your hands, you there, holding this book, kind of figuring, well, should I buy it or shouldn't I: well good, I'll tell you about Ryan Ridge. He is the single greatest should-be-already-known-by-everyone young writer of genius, of sparkling drugged handsome funny--and if you can be funny, like this guy funny, knock yourself out, if you can be this smart and funny, but you're probably getting sort of tired already just trying to imagine being the kind of funny this guy is funny, not easy funny, genius funny, the kind to make you laugh, make you just GD tickled how funny he is, clever, historically playful, formally inventive, big scope, firework, Brautigan, you know, bred with say Vonnegut, listen, I'm getting a bit famished here, trying to convoke you into getting it, that this guy, Ridge, remember, Ryan Ridge, he is not someone to put the book thereof's down, I'm saying buy it buy it buy it, and then try like hell after you finish it, in one day, in an afternoon, convexed into it as you will be, rushing through it, swallowing the whole book trying to--once all through it you'll be wanting more, then try like hell to get a handle on his first book Hunters and Gamblers, after you finish American Homes and then do what I do, and wait your pretty self for the next one to come from Ryan Ridge into your lucky hands."
—Luke Goebel, author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours and Kill Dick
"Ryan Ridge has toppled everything. An insane and brilliant book that travels the American Home while moving ever further into the mind. What is possible in writing feels different now."
—Amina Cain, author of Creature and Indelicacy
"You want to know what I think about Ryan Ridge, the writer, the author of this great book in your hands, you there, holding this book, kind of figuring, well, should I buy it or shouldn't I: well good, I'll tell you about Ryan Ridge. He is the single greatest should-be-already-known-by-everyone young writer of genius, of sparkling drugged handsome funny--and if you can be funny, like this guy funny, knock yourself out, if you can be this smart and funny, but you're probably getting sort of tired already just trying to imagine being the kind of funny this guy is funny, not easy funny, genius funny, the kind to make you laugh, make you just GD tickled how funny he is, clever, historically playful, formally inventive, big scope, firework, Brautigan, you know, bred with say Vonnegut, listen, I'm getting a bit famished here, trying to convoke you into getting it, that this guy, Ridge, remember, Ryan Ridge, he is not someone to put the book thereof's down, I'm saying buy it buy it buy it, and then try like hell after you finish it, in one day, in an afternoon, convexed into it as you will be, rushing through it, swallowing the whole book trying to--once all through it you'll be wanting more, then try like hell to get a handle on his first book Hunters and Gamblers, after you finish American Homes and then do what I do, and wait your pretty self for the next one to come from Ryan Ridge into your lucky hands."
—Luke Goebel, author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours and Kill Dick
MORE PRAISE
"Ryan Ridge’s American Homes is a guidebook gagbook rulebook dreambook thoughtbook freakbook stylebook cookbook mapbook. It’s overflowing with ideas, with mental diagrams and musings on the vast contraptions that surround us every day. Somewhere between Perec and Brautigan, between Barthelme and Markson, Ridge emerges from the rhizome of rooms we call today and nudges it in the ribs until there’s a hole there for you to stick your head in and inhale the funny bubbles of fresh blood."
—Blake Butler, author of 300,000,000 and Void Corporation
"In the kitchens in Ryan Ridge’s American Homes are Cuisinarts into which he pours the words he bakes into loaves of prose, more wry than rye. The sandwiches he makes from them are fun to eat but leave a bitter taste in the mouth because the Land of American Homes is, after all, a bitter place. Still: the American Home is “shooting sunbeams out of its eye sockets” so welcome home. And welcome Ryan Ridge’s American Homes into yours!"
—Denis Wood, author of Everything Sings
"Ryan Ridge inflects his anatomy of suburban interiors with a madcap, panoptic conceptualist idiom, and his readers will be left feeling they never gave nearly enough thought to the stuff that real, lived life comprises: walls, floors, doors, windows, garages, sheds, attics and basements. Ostensibly a tongue-in-cheek meditation satirizing the homogenization of contemporary domestic space, American Homes develops a truly heterogeneous literary architecture founded on the basis of formal dynamism and linguistic play."
—Evan Lavender-Smith, author of From Old Notebooks
"Ridge's book explores the contradictions inherent in ideals of affluence and ownership, and does so admirably, without edging into sourness or satirical revenge killing. The humor is affable, and odd. Somewhere between Demetri Martin and Steven Wright, Jacques Tati and Wes Anderson, Ramon Gomez de la Serna and Georges Perec."
—"The Gravitas of the American Dream," Electric Literature
"Think Cortazar’s Instructions from Cronopios y Famas mixed with the utilitarian voice of a Saunders short story."
— Small Press Book Review
—Blake Butler, author of 300,000,000 and Void Corporation
"In the kitchens in Ryan Ridge’s American Homes are Cuisinarts into which he pours the words he bakes into loaves of prose, more wry than rye. The sandwiches he makes from them are fun to eat but leave a bitter taste in the mouth because the Land of American Homes is, after all, a bitter place. Still: the American Home is “shooting sunbeams out of its eye sockets” so welcome home. And welcome Ryan Ridge’s American Homes into yours!"
—Denis Wood, author of Everything Sings
"Ryan Ridge inflects his anatomy of suburban interiors with a madcap, panoptic conceptualist idiom, and his readers will be left feeling they never gave nearly enough thought to the stuff that real, lived life comprises: walls, floors, doors, windows, garages, sheds, attics and basements. Ostensibly a tongue-in-cheek meditation satirizing the homogenization of contemporary domestic space, American Homes develops a truly heterogeneous literary architecture founded on the basis of formal dynamism and linguistic play."
—Evan Lavender-Smith, author of From Old Notebooks
"Ridge's book explores the contradictions inherent in ideals of affluence and ownership, and does so admirably, without edging into sourness or satirical revenge killing. The humor is affable, and odd. Somewhere between Demetri Martin and Steven Wright, Jacques Tati and Wes Anderson, Ramon Gomez de la Serna and Georges Perec."
—"The Gravitas of the American Dream," Electric Literature
"Think Cortazar’s Instructions from Cronopios y Famas mixed with the utilitarian voice of a Saunders short story."
— Small Press Book Review
HUNTERS & GAMBLERS
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A sham pastor hires a cocaine-sniffing centaur to act as mascot for an Evangelical mega-church's arena football team; Paul Revere flashes across a revolutionary sky on the back of a sunbird; an ammo-less infantry drummer and a bleeding medic are beat back to a Best Western parking lot in the Battle of Sacramento—such are the situations contained in Ryan Ridge's Hunters & Gamblers. Winners of the negative lottery, these characters have learned to love to lose everything until there's nothing left to lose. And the end is desperate, black, drenched in whiskey, but punctuated by poignancy and revelry and revelation. The tales in this lurid, edgy debut illuminate blackness with even blacker humor and a sense of outlandish beauty.
Publisher: Dark Sky Books ISBN: 978-0983067450 Publication Date: 7/14/2011 125 Pages |
PRAISE FOR HUNTERS & GAMBLERS
“Smart and excellent!”
—William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky
“Ryan Ridge’s stories are lacerating cuts that expose the gray matter and turbulence of a nation. Ridge’s inventiveness is unlimited, a panoptical lens that lets us see what is part myth and part video and part tazered dream.”
—Bruce Smith, author of Devotions
“Smart and excellent!”
—William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky
“Ryan Ridge’s stories are lacerating cuts that expose the gray matter and turbulence of a nation. Ridge’s inventiveness is unlimited, a panoptical lens that lets us see what is part myth and part video and part tazered dream.”
—Bruce Smith, author of Devotions
MORE PRAISE
“Ridge is a wild combing mix of humor and heartache, in the style and spirit of Brautigan and Hannah and Vonnegut. Get yourself some Ridge, like a can of beer and a hot tray of T.V. dinners and settle in for a night spent with the almost unbearable humor and tragic madness of our alien mothercountry.”
—Luke Goebel, author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them are Yours and Kill Dick
“The big New York publishers will be publishing things like Hunters & Gamblers in twenty years, but by then it will all be over. Things are starting now and, as usual, the adventure begins out west. With this book, it seems the revolution is already being written about.”
—Curtis Dawkins, author of The Graybar Hotel
“Ryan Ridge’s Hunters & Gamblers is a fantastic ride. It’s smart but not pretentious. It’s fun but not too silly. And Ridge, to be certain, is a sharp mofo, poking fun at a culture that’s forgotten how to poke fun at itself. I guess it’s safe to say that this is one of those timely books that come along every now and then that we should make a point not to miss. So don’t.”
—Mel Bosworth, author of Freight
“Ryan Ridge’s debut story collection Hunters & Gamblers is a grim, bleakly funny, constantly surprising view of a kind of alternate America, one in which megachurch pastors import coke-addicted centaurs to serve as mascots, girl scouts extort would-be customers, and the Battle of Sacramento was fought between hippies and a paramilitary group. Ridge’s sentences are dizzying, so well-built that they almost necessitate an immediate second reading.”
— The Rupture
“Story-by-story and sentence-by-sentence, Hunters & Gamblers reveals a truth-teller with a silver tongue. If America the bully needs to get loogied at, Ryan Ridge is the man for the hock.”
—Mike Young, author of Sprezzatura
“Ryan Ridge’s brilliant Hunters & Gamblers reads more like a library than a collection of stories. It takes on a much broader swath of history and eternity (sometimes in the same piece) than most fiction ever does, and the contemporary world snaps across its pages. It’s filled with humor, anger, joy (in language, in existence) vision—accomplished in stories both exquisitely experimental and edgily mainstream—will stay with you long after the book is done.”
—Paul Griner, author of The Book of Otto and Liam
“Reading Ryan Ridge’s wild wheel of stories, large and small, is like crossing the street in London: You look one way but the surprise is coming from the other. This is a terrific debut of a welcome new talent."
—Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies
—Luke Goebel, author of Fourteen Stories, None of Them are Yours and Kill Dick
“The big New York publishers will be publishing things like Hunters & Gamblers in twenty years, but by then it will all be over. Things are starting now and, as usual, the adventure begins out west. With this book, it seems the revolution is already being written about.”
—Curtis Dawkins, author of The Graybar Hotel
“Ryan Ridge’s Hunters & Gamblers is a fantastic ride. It’s smart but not pretentious. It’s fun but not too silly. And Ridge, to be certain, is a sharp mofo, poking fun at a culture that’s forgotten how to poke fun at itself. I guess it’s safe to say that this is one of those timely books that come along every now and then that we should make a point not to miss. So don’t.”
—Mel Bosworth, author of Freight
“Ryan Ridge’s debut story collection Hunters & Gamblers is a grim, bleakly funny, constantly surprising view of a kind of alternate America, one in which megachurch pastors import coke-addicted centaurs to serve as mascots, girl scouts extort would-be customers, and the Battle of Sacramento was fought between hippies and a paramilitary group. Ridge’s sentences are dizzying, so well-built that they almost necessitate an immediate second reading.”
— The Rupture
“Story-by-story and sentence-by-sentence, Hunters & Gamblers reveals a truth-teller with a silver tongue. If America the bully needs to get loogied at, Ryan Ridge is the man for the hock.”
—Mike Young, author of Sprezzatura
“Ryan Ridge’s brilliant Hunters & Gamblers reads more like a library than a collection of stories. It takes on a much broader swath of history and eternity (sometimes in the same piece) than most fiction ever does, and the contemporary world snaps across its pages. It’s filled with humor, anger, joy (in language, in existence) vision—accomplished in stories both exquisitely experimental and edgily mainstream—will stay with you long after the book is done.”
—Paul Griner, author of The Book of Otto and Liam
“Reading Ryan Ridge’s wild wheel of stories, large and small, is like crossing the street in London: You look one way but the surprise is coming from the other. This is a terrific debut of a welcome new talent."
—Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies
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