Weird Weeks by Ryan Ridge & Mel Bosworth

Ryan Ridge is the author of three books, including American Homes (University of Michigan Press, 2015), which was the Michigan Library Publishing Club’s inaugural book club pick. His next book, Second Acts, a collection of stories coauthored with Mel Bosworth, will be released by Alternating Current Press in 2018. In 2016, Ridge received the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction judged by Jonathan Lethem. An assistant professor at Weber State University, he lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, and edits the literary magazine Juked. 

 

Mel Bosworth is the author of the novel Freight, the poetry chapbook Every Laundromat in the World, and co-author with Ryan Ridge of the story collection Second Acts. His work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, Per Contra, New World Writing, Santa Monica Review, Melville House, American Book Review, and elsewhere. A former series editor for the Wigleaf Top 50 and associate editor for The Best Small Fictions, he currently curates the Small Press Book Review. Mel lives in Western Massachusetts.

“Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth have produced the most perfect weird book in Weird Weeks. 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 The Unfinished World

 

“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 author of A Collapse of Horses

 

“Weird Weeks 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, Weird Weeks 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 Empire of Light

 

“Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth’s collection of coordinated tandem shenanigans, Weird Weeks, 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 Clues from the Animal Kingdom

 

“Weird Weeks 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

 

“Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth are literary collaborators, working together to write short fiction, which embraces, subverts, celebrates American idiom in ways reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, Mark Leyner, the poet Tony Hoagland, to draw a few flattering if obvious comparisons. Like Will Rogers on acid.”

-–Bibliocracy Radio on KPFK