Flash Gardens, and Other Short Fiction: Volume Two

Volume Two of Flash Gardens and Short Fiction resumes the compilation of fiction begun in Volume One, with more independently published, self-contained excerpts from longer works. If the focus of Volume One was, overall, melancholic remembrance of things past and forays into nostalgia, Volume Two, while echoing that focus, contains more comic material, ranging from dark humor to outright slapstick. The author maintains that fiction and poetry are endemically autobiographical in that every thought process abetting their creation filters through an individual mind with its singular, subjective peccadillos, biases, nuances and impressions. This applies to work that seems "objective", as is the case with some of the historically based work in this volume. Again, New Orleans and southwest Virginia remain the settings or locales for the stories; and the dramatis personae resemble real people the author knows or has known. Some of the New Orleans excerpts will challenge readers unfamiliar with the local patois and dialect of that mythic city, but the author has attempted to render them faithfully, as he recollects them.

The seven volumes of Louis Gallo's poetry are Archaeology, Scherzo Furiant, Crash, Clearing the Attic, Ghostly Demarcation & The Pandemic Papers, Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing? and Leeway & Advent. His work appeared in Best Short Fiction 2020. A novella, "The Art Deco Lung", appeared in Storylandia. National Public Radio aired a reading and discussion of his poetry on its "With Good Reason" series (December 2020). His work has appeared or will shortly appear in Wide Awake in the Pelican State (LSU anthology), Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth, Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review, and many others. Chapbooks include The Truth Changes, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions of the Twentieth Century. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books: A New Orleans Review. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times. He is the recipient of NEA grants for Fiction and Poet in the Schools. He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia. He is a native of New Orleans.