stories, by Thor Garcia

ISBN 978-0-9571213-4-8. Paperback. 340pp. Publication date: April 2013. Equus Press: London.
Price: € 15.00 (not including postage).

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Read an interview with the author by the Czech Radio.

The hellraising, nightmarish genius of Thor Garcia has returned in this explosive collection of sordid, hilarious, gut-twisting tales. Meet the infamous Lenka, the mournful cripple who never met a penis she didn’t want to chop. Or Cleo Blump, beaten and raped from an early age, who rises to lead the Blond Revolution. There’s father Ernie, the athletic standout who never did care much for being a man. And George P., the poet and ex-boxer who finds it all floating out of his grasp. Meet Halingwhorst, the drunk, once-scorned writer, as he edges toward unimaginable triumph. And the anonymous man ruined by divorce, who runs into a dangerously un-smooth criminal on the day Michael Jackson died. Jump on and let Thor Garcia take you on a hard-drinking, hard-living drive. It’s a no-holes-barred assassination of our world today. The horror, madness and humor – along with the impeccable dialogue and fast-moving prose – will leave you breathless.

“If Thor Garcia’s Only Fools Die of Heartbreak, his latest short fiction collection, had somehow been published in the 19th Century, it would have given Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn a run for their money as the most controversial and banned book in the nation.”—Gabino Iglesias, Necessary Fiction

“Garciův román je v každém případě obdivuhodný. Skutečně současný román, který je silný a sebevědomý a vyjadřuje se k zásadním otázkám života mladší a střední generace, jako jsou sex, pornografie, alkohol, drogy, přátelství, láska, politika.”—Pavla Jonssonová, iliteratura.cz

“Experiential landmines litter the treacherous dreamscape of Thor Garcia’s collection of short stories, Only Fools Die of Heartache. In its minutiae it is reminiscent of a Bosch post apocalyptic vision, a society that self-destructed sometime in the 1970s or 1980s but still stands like a zombie, lifelessly animated without an inner core, able to infect living nations with the propaganda of its pop culture, a self-parodying celebration of mediocrity, of unimaginative, derivative cliché considered high art. It is, of course, the US, viewed at times from within but most often through the Kafkaesque lens of expatriate life in Prague.”—Jim Chaffee, The Drill Press