The Strangeness

In these 42 "sudden fictions" - fictional stories of about 500 words each - Tom Nugent asks, among several other burning questions: "Who put the dih in the dih-dih-dih?" He fails to answer the question, however. Still, he gives it his best. In one of the stranger narratives to be found in this thoroughly odd collection, a tormented English 101 instructor goes eyeball to eyeball with a tank full of floating jellyfish at the Chicago Aquarium. Can the "jellies" help him understand the true nature of human reality? Other stories focus on a short-tempered man with a glass eye, a senile Irishman who triggers an outbreak of social mayhem at a gambling casino run by Ojibwas, and a heartsick jilted husband whose life changes forever after he watches a Baltimore Gas & Electric Company meter reader morph into a fire-snorting bull. What does it all mean? Nugent says he doesn't know. He's a journalist, novelist, short-story writer - and the father of four astonishingly independent minded young women.