Tag: miserable holiday stories

miserable holiday stories wins best book award!

I’m thrilled and honored to announce that Miserable Holiday Stories has won a 2021 Best Book Award in the category: Humor! MHS was also a finalist in two other BBA categories:  Fiction Anthologies and Fiction Short Story.

The awards were presented by AmericanBookFest.com which states that “this year’s contest yielded over 2,000 entries from mainstream and independent publishers” including HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Macmillan Publishers, New World Library, NYU Press and Oxford University Press, among dozens of others.

About the book:

No matter what holiday you celebrate, this quirky yet bittersweet compilation will have you longing for mid-January. Featuring Jewish Elvis impersonators, a kidnapped Santa Claus, confused parents, horrific holiday traffic, unbreakable toys and the ever-heroic Bicycle Boys, Miserable Holiday Stories will be sure to have you asking, “who ate all the $#!@% figgy pudding?!”

Miserable Holiday Stories (20 Festive Failures That Are Worse Than Yours)
Publisher: Racehorse (a division of Skyhorse Publishing)
Available from Amazon.com, BN.com, numerous other online retailers, and finer bookstores everywhere.

blue christmas

Blue Christmas, the very first story in Miserable Holiday Stories, is about a young man that has to provide an entertainer at the last minute for his temple’s big holiday party – and the only one he can find is a temperamental Elvis impersonator. In the clip below I read the story in it’s entirety, and do a terrible terrible Elvis impression. I apologize in advance. Big thanks to the Springfield Free Public Library for hosting the event!

 

miserable holiday stories wins independent press award!

Extremely excited to announce that Miserable Holiday Stories has been recognized as a Distinguished Favorite in the Humor category in the 2021 Independent Press Awards!

In 2021, the Independent Press Award had entries worldwide. The competition is judged by experts from different aspects of the book industry, including publishers, writers, editors, book cover designers and professional copywriters. Selected award winners and distinguished favorites are based on overall excellence.

About the book: “Featuring Jewish Elvis impersonators, a kidnapped Santa Claus, confused parents, horrific holiday traffic, unbreakable toys and the ever-heroic Bicycle Boys, Miserable Holiday Stories will be sure to have you asking, who ate all the $#!@# figgy pudding?!”

Miserable Holiday Stories is published by Racehorse, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. For more information on the book, please click here.

For more information on the Independent Press Awards, please click here.

miserable holiday stories

Very excited to announce the release of the NEW improved version of Miserable Holiday Stories – just in time for the upcoming holiday season!

From the copy blurb:

Throw another yule log on the fire and let the seasonal suffering begin! No matter what holiday you celebrate, these quirky yet bittersweet tales will have you longing for mid-January. Featuring Jewish Elvis impersonators, a kidnapped Santa Claus, confused parents, horrific holiday traffic, unbreakable toys and the ever-heroic Bicycle Boys, Miserable Holiday Stories will be sure to have you asking, “who ate all the $#!@% figgy pudding?!”

This upgraded 2.0 version comes from the fine folks at Skyhorse Publishing, and contains eleven new pieces, including the entire (kid-friendly) novella The Unbreakable Toy!

Miserable Holiday Stories is the latest “Miserable” release and a lovely year-end gift for all those friends and relatives who you feel haven’t suffered enough already in 2020!

give the gift of misery!

Even Santa agrees – Miserable Holiday Stories is the perfect holiday gift for that very special someone you’d rather never hear from again!

Featuring the the infamous chapter-book parody “The #$@!# Bicycle Boys Save Christmas, Again!” and stories from such eclectic journals as The Big Jewel, Litro, Corvus, eFiction, Dysfunctional Family Story, The Legendary, Blue Print Review, and Hobo Pancakes!

This collection of quirky, bittersweet tales is a terrific stocking stuffer and cheaper than coal!

Now available in e-book and cheap paperback to boot!

Miserable Adventure Stories – Now Available!

I’m pleased as punch to announce the arrival of my second fiction collection, Miserable Adventure Stories – just in time for the holidays!

MAS is a pulpy, genre-bending brew of pieces that have appeared over the past few years at New Pop Lit, The Big Jewel, The Zodiac Review, Defenestrationism, HeadStuff, Blue Skirt Productions, Saturday Night Reader, Near to the Knuckle, and Gi60.  It’s a companion piece to Miserable Holiday Stories (both of which are now available in lovely print editions!), and…it’s, uhm, actually much funnier than that volume, IMO.

MAS features a whopping 15 stories, including the soon-to-be classics “The Rottweiler”, “Across the Tundra”, and the fresh-off-the-presses parody of Lincoln in the Bardo – “Groucho in the Bardo”.

Here’s the blurb from Amazon:

Tentacled monsters! Frozen wastelands! Nixon! Sherlock Holmes! Groucho! In his latest collection, the author of “Miserable Holiday Stories!” takes you to Victorian London, the Old West, alien worlds, Hamlet’s Denmark and other fantastic places that you would absolutely never want to visit. Featuring stories from The Big Jewel, New Pop Lit, The Zodiac Review, and other literary journals with equally fancy names, this head-scratchingly awful collection will make you wonder why you didn’t just stay home and rent a movie.

Miserable Adventure Stories retails for a measly $6.99 in paperback and an even measlier $1.99 for the e-book.

Order both collections and give your loved ones a truly disastrous stocking stuffer!

 

Miserable Holiday Stories – Now in Print!

It’s the perfect stocking stuffer and cheaper than coal!

For the first time ever, Miserable Holiday Stories is now available in a print edition!  And just in time for the holidays!

Yes, now you can actually wrap up a physical copy of Miserable Holiday Stories – with a bow, if you like! – and send sleigh-loads of seasonal misery to family members and other people you don’t really like.  And, unlike the e-version, the print version is flammable and ready to help set your yule log ablaze!

Featuring the infamous chapter-book parody The #$@!# Bicycle Boys Save Christmas, Again!, the new print version of Miserable Holiday Stories is available from your favorite online retailers as well as discerning bookstores everywhere!

for your consideration!


Folks!  If you’ve read and enjoyed Plrknib this year (and, hell, even if you haven’t!) please consider making Plrknib your write-in vote for Best Memoir in the Goodreads Choice Awards 2017!  It’s easy enough to do.  Just click on this link here and enter – Plrknib.  There!  You’re done!  Excellent!  Wasn’t that easy?

You can only enter Plrknib as a Write-in for one category.  So, while we would certainly love you for to enter it in eg – humor, nonfiction, or debut Goodreads author (which technically, alas, it’s not – damn you, Miserable Holiday Stories!) – we would really love it if you’d plug us right there into the Memoir category.

And then…go vote for all those other books you loved this year!

Thanks, and remember – Reading Is Good!

across the tundra

TundraImage_021714c

My story Tundra is now live at Blue Skirt Productions.

Here’s an excerpt.

——————

December 22, 1969.

Just turn around

was the scratched record endlessly repeating in my head.

This is stupid. I’m stupid.

I should just turn around.

But when I got to Dell Farms, and it was farther back than forward, my dogged, irrational Want kept me moving straight on, ahead.

***

The lukewarm water was taking way too long to heat up the thermometer. And then I noticed Dad’s cigarettes and lighter on the back of the toilet. So, I flicked his Bic and held the flame under the thermometer bulb, and with a quick, tiny POPit exploded, shattering glass and mercury everywhere. My heart beating furiously, I quickly unrolled sheets and sheets of toilet paper and sopped up (or at least contained) the glass and liquid metal, and flushed the whole thing down the toilet, praying it wouldn’t clog. It didn’t. And I found and opened a new thermometer and ran it under the now warmer water.

101º.

Perfect.

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