Suburban Folktales
By Josh Russell
2019
First Published
4.73
Average Rating
38
Number of Pages
In Josh Russell’s Suburban Folktales, the humdrum ennui of housewives and suburbanites is enfolded an old logic, a folk logic. Princesses home birth babies in their sleep, passers-by home birth diminutive duplicates on the sidewalk, and pregnant queens keep company with neoliberal birds. Kings text their daughters. Everyone already has cancer. Everybody has a complaint. But who reigns over the suburbs? Who will repair the storm damage? Who will purchase dough enough to make a man? Formed from the lineage of Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales, Russell’s stories suggest that even quotidian cares are subject to the strange and wondrous.
Avg Rating
4.73
Number of Ratings
15
5 STARS
80%
4 STARS
13%
3 STARS
7%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads
Author
Josh Russell
Author · 5 books
I'm the author of three novels: A True History of the Captivation, Transport to Strange Lands, & Deliverance of Hannah Guttentag (Dzanc Books, 2012); Yellow Jack (W.W. Norton, 1999), which earned me the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Shane Stevens Fellowship in the Novel; and My Bright Midnight (LSU Press, 2010), which earned me a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose and won the Independent Publisher Book Awards bronze medal for Literary Fiction. My shorter prose has appeared in the Greying Ghost Press chapbook Pretend You'll Do It Again, and in several dozen magazines, textbooks, and anthologies, most recently Epoch, Copper Nickel, and Not Normal, Illinois.
