- Publication Date: January 15, 2024
- Genre: Short Stories
- Retail Price: $3
- Word Count: 80,000 words (approximately 250 pages)
- Get the downloadable ebook: Payhip | Smashwords
- Get the cloud-based ebook: Google Play | Kobo | BN | Amazon US | Amazon UK
Book Description
In a few months, Personville Press will release a new story collection by Ohio author Jack Matthews (1925-2013) in ebook format. This is his 11th story collection.
Over his lifetime Jack Matthews wrote over 200 stories, many of which were published in literary journals during his lifetime. Although stories varied widely in subject and style, they often could be described as urbane, philosophical, poetic and sardonic.
Stories in the new collection Boxes of Time were mostly published between 1965 and 1980; they feature characters who are troubled or unsure of themselves trying to deal with life’s usual disappointments. Stylistically these stories are polished and carefully written, but they deal with messy emotions, troubled families and damaged personalities. The characters may not be as educated or self-assured as the people in Second Death of E.A. Poe (2021) or Crazy Women (1985), but they still manage to figure out interesting things about themselves and the people around them. Stories from this period focus especially on the emotional stresses that separate parents from their children.
This collection also includes a handful of experimental pieces — existential questionnaires (a peculiar literary form invented by Matthews which tells a story by asking a series of leading questions) and short historical fantasies which explore the darker side of well-known people in history.
This ebook contains 30+ stories by Jack Matthews which have never been collected, making it the author’s largest story collection. Matthews picked “Boxes of Time” as the title for this collection because each story reveals the drama of worlds long since gone but whose dreams and fears and anxieties still resonate today.
