Acid Novelist to Give Away Collection of Short Stories

“ Author of Wisdom's Maw distributes short story collection freely over the Internet. ”

Far Gone Books

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(ePrintWire.Org) – Todd Brendan Fahey, author of the novel Wisdom's Maw [Far Gone Books, 1996]--surrounding the CIA's LSD experiments known as Project MK-ULTRA--has opted to disperse his collection of black satire, Dogshit Park & other atrocities, freely over the Internet.

"Satire hasn't been in vogue in literature--well, probably ever," cracks Fahey, in an interview with Mondo 2000 founder R. U. Sirius. "It is a cast of mind, and which often feels like a curse. Joseph Heller did it right with Catch-22; Vonnegut lived on it; William S. Burroughs was it. And of course, Hunter. And they're all gone."

The collection--which includes interviews Fahey conducted with Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary, and a legally-challenged aborted fragment for cigar magazine Smoke--was born of a troubled marriage, the strain of becoming a university English professor, despite intense stage fright, and copious quantities of LSD--which, he admits, "had to that point fueled nearly all of my fiction and creative nonfiction."

The core stories were constructed in four months, at the turn of 1993, as Fahey says, "in a white heat, basically smashed on acid." They center, as does all satire, on social discontent--marital dispute, workplace monotony, avarice and lust, and with a heavy emphasis on Dogshit Park: "A haven," as he tells it, "for winos and druggies, in the rich, white student ghetto of Isla Vista," on the fringes of affluent UC-Santa Barbara campus, where Fahey spent his first two years of university.

Three of the stories involve the titular locale. Others morph fragments of the author's adult past: his introductory teaching stint in Salt Lake City, Utah; a rocky tenure as a doctoral Teaching Fellow at University of Louisiana-Lafayette, and a special fixation with Amsterdam.

Having run the rounds of the New York literary regime and "the world of agents," Fahey says: "No way was 'a publisher' going to take this bunch. And I could have felled trees and spent $5k to get it done that way [via self publishing], but why?"

Fahey honed his craft within the graduate Professional Writing Program at USC, studying for two years under Hubert Selby, Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and further within University of Louisiana-Lafayette, where Pulitzer nominee Ernest J. Gaines tolerated his on-paper antics with bemusement. "He said they seemed right for Penthouse; I took it as a compliment," Fahey recalls. (Gaines penned back-jacket praise for Wisdom's Maw.)

A university professor by trade, Todd Brendan Fahey writes because he must, acknowledging thus far few fiscal dividends. "Blake died broke and so did many others. But if it's in you, it's got to come out."

Dogshit Park & other atrocities can be found as another Far Gone Book at: www.dogshitpark.com