Vintage Vinyl Playlist, Short Stories By John Michael Flynn Published By Fomite

Vintage Vinyl Playlist, published by Fomite, is now available in paperback or in E-book format: https://fomitepress.com/

Thank you to Donna Bister at Fomite and her husband, the late Marc Estrin.

Find the book at Waterstones UK: https://www.waterstones.com/book/vintage-vinyl-playlist/john-michael-flynn/9781959984160

At Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vintage-Vinyl-Playlist-Michael-Flynn/dp/1959984160

At World of Books UK: https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/vintage-vinyl-playlist-book-john-michael-flynn-9781959984160

From the back cover:

Music abides as an elemental force in the lives and situations chronicled in each of these seventeen stories and a concluding novella....What all the characters share is a desire to follow Emerson's advice to "make much of your own place."

The collection is in three parts, the first group of stories inspired by jazz, the second by classical music, the third part a fusion resulting in a novella.

Here below is the Table Of Contents, and the Acknowledgments page. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 ALBUM ONE, QUINTET FORTUNA, A JAZZ-BLUES JAM IN C ON BLUENOTE

Melodia: A Sea Of Blurred Light 

Harmonia: Scarlet Leonard 

Clavis: All Roads Lead To Gravity 

Metrum: Our Blowout 

Modum: A Question Of Execution 

ALBUM TWO, PURSE  ~ CONSCIENCE, GALLIARDS AND PAVANES IN 12 POLYPHONOUS MOVEMENTS ON MERCURY LIVING PRESENCE

Why The Good Are Needed

The Millbury Street Legend

Water Towers

Not Your House

Shoulda Seen Me Up There In Mississauga

Rainlight

Perfect Posture

The Meatloaf Sighting

Glass Nails Shower Back Into The Sea

Anomie Among The Arrivistes

One-Handed Egg

The Birds Of Panic

ALBUM THREE, NOVELLA, CAPRICCIOSO IN E ON CORAL RECORDS

Forget You Knew Me 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

"A Question Of Execution" in Retreats From Oblivion: The Journal of Noircom

"A Sea Of Blurred Light" in Fiction On The Web, UK

"Scarlet Leonard" in Fleas On The Dog

"Why The Good Are Needed" in Italian Americana Review

"The Millbury Street Legend" in Red Earth Review

"Water Towers" in Litro Magazine New York

"Not Your House" in Call Me [Stranger] Literary Journal

"Shoulda Seen Me Up There In Mississauga" in The Wrong Quarterly

"The Meatloaf Sighting" in Rue Scribe

"Glass Nails Shower Back Into The Sea", published as "The Basking Shark", in Prime Number Magazine Editors’ Selections Anthology, Volume 1

Off To The Next Wherever, Short Stories By John Michael Flynn, Published By Fomite

Off To The Next Wherever

This collection of short stories was published in paperback and as an E-book in April of 2017 by Fomite, available here at https://fomitepress.com/ and here  https://fomitepress.com/off-to-the-next-wherever.html

You can also find it here at Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Next-Wherever-John-Michael-Flynn/dp/1942515154

Here at OverDrive; https://www.overdrive.com/creators/1085168/john-michael-flynn

Here as an E-book from Barnes and Noble UK: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/off-to-the-next-wherever-john-michael-flynn/1123253673?ean=2940152572469

Here at Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/607337

*

This is excerpted from a review in Peace Corps Writers And Readers by Kathleen Coskran:

"Flynn offers a rare breadth of experience –around the world and at home....The longest story in the collection, “A Question for the Devil's Rope,” narrated by a Hmong-American artist on a road trip with her boyfriend, opens with her question, “Is Freedom Possible.” 

"As they drive west from Virginia, heading for Taos, the question looms at every stop, a bit like a mirage that pulls you relentlessly forward towards a place you can never reach — and the question is still hanging out there at the end. 

"Many of the stories are like this — a movement with uncertain resolution — a lot like life, which may be the point of Off to the Next Wherever."

*

You can find the review in its entirety here: https://peacecorpsworldwide.org/review-off-to-the-nextwherever/

And excerpted from a review by Ben Sloan in Rain Taxi Review Of Books:

"The panoramic range of characters and locations in this book is breathtaking…Not lost in this grand sweep is the need to anchor experience in concrete detail…."

Below is a scan of Ben Sloan's complete review. Find it here, as well: https://raintaxi.com/

Dreaming Rodin, A Short Story Collection Published By PUBLERATI

Dreaming Rodin

"Flynn doesn’t spoon-feed us his messages, he makes us think." 

This quotation above is from a 2014 review by Davida Chazan at The Chocolate Lady's Book Review Blog: https://tcl-bookreviews.com/2014/02/04/artful-stories/

In 2013, Publerati's editor, Caleb Mason, brought out an E-book of short stories, Dreaming Rodin. Here's a link to an interveiw with Caleb archived online: https://mail.teleread.com/interview-with-caleb-mason-of-publerati/index.html

Here's Caleb interviewed by Publisher's Weekly discussing the tenth anniversary of Publerati: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/85828-at-10-years-publerati-aims-to-stay-small.html

Here's a link to Goodreads and some other reviews: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19487006-dreaming-rodin

Publerati https://publerati.com/ is dedicated to promoting meritorious work by authors who are writing outside of traditional genres. 

All profits go to supporting to literature programs at schools around the world. 

Please support them: https://publerati.com/dreaming-rodin/ 

Something Grand, John Flynn's First Collection Of Short Stories, Published By B Movie Press

In 2002, photographer David Wilcox shot this picture of an old typewriter he stumbled across in an abandoned factory building in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence. The publisher agreed to use it as the cover image of my first book of stories, Something Grand.

Here is a link to the paperback on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Something-Grand-John-Flynn/dp/0967824222

Years later, long after the paperback went out of print, it was re-released as an E-book:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Something-Grand-John-Flynn-ebook/dp/B008RYZ164

For the E-book cover, I used a photo I'd taken in 2004 of an art installation in Manhattan's Bryant Park that featured cage upon cage full of manual typewriters. 

When David Wilcox and I met, he was the manager and the photo-finisher of a Sprint franchise lab on Weybosset Avenue in Providence. I lived a couple blocks away, stopped in often, and we became fast friends. 

Together, we knocked about Providence, day and night, taking photos, experimenting with different cameras and film speeds. We had access to a darkroom for black and white images, and all the Sprint equipment for processing color negatives and prints.

Here below are eight images I shot, and that Dave processed and printed.

 

What the Something Grand collection features is the first short story I ever published, The Tire, which appeared in Aldeberan magazine in 1980. 

The collection's title story earned an award in 1990 from the HG Roberts Foundation of Kansas State University. 

The book's back cover image, seen above, was taken on a London rooftop by Rick Corbo.

Inspiration for the photo came after the night Rick and I viewed the midnight showing of a film by David Lynch: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/22/david-lynch-eraserhead

It was screened in the late Odeon, Kensington, pictured below. We sat in the balcony and audience members could drink and smoke. We enjoyed a potent contact high as other moviegoers downed their pints, puffed on their fags and shared their reefers while being transmogrified by Eraserhead for the first time. 

Inspired by Lynch's story about Henry, raving about it, we walked London streets back to our rooming house flat at four in the morning, hatching a plan to sneak up to the rooftop so Rick could try his hand at creating some urban black and white imagery. Little did I know that 22 years later I'd find the photo in a shoebox, scan it and decide to use it. 

We were entranced by Lynch's bizarrely comedic take on isolation and alienation, his use of eerie ambient noises and a black and white photography that was austere, poetic, surreal and dreadful in the way it captured a hellish yet fascinating urban industrial landscape. https://online.ucpress.edu/res/article-abstract/2/1/52/116593/Beautiful-If-You-See-It-the-Right-Way-David-Lynch?redirectedFrom=fulltext

This led to my discovery of Charles Sheeler, one of the artists who inspired my early stabs at short fiction: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/edph/hd_edph.htm

Charles Sheeler, below.

That was quite a time for Rick Corbo. A few weeks later he met one of his heroes, Frank Oz, one of the original creators of The Muppets. 

The meeting happened in the lobby during a break between acts of the premiere at London's National Theatre of Amadeus by Peter Shaffer.

Below, London's National Theatre at night.

Rick was so chuffed that he convinced Mr. Oz to meet with him and later that week they had a cup of coffee together. During that same period, Rick crossed paths with Orson Welles who, like Mr. Oz, was in London to film or perhaps promote (I never really knew) the second Muppet movie. Unfortunately, Rick and Orson never had coffee together.