Pleasant Tales — Brendan Connell

According to inductive process, the more weed someone smokes, the more likely they are to eat a green apple. Billy Glandzk has been smoking too much pot and hates apples, so it's time for him to change his lifestyle. Justin Isis lives in a single tiny room in Ikebukuro but, through amore and refined fashion-sense, hopes to rise to higher spheres. Ricky Fishback is a bicycle cop who has spent too much time in the saddle, and his restless sex life is taking a turn for the worse. Can he get his mojo back? Carla Jo Arduini works at the Family Dollar Store, but her aspirations go higher--much higher. Will her faith guide her to success?

In Pleasant Tales, a contrasting follow up to his critically acclaimed 2010 collection Unpleasant Tales, Brendan Connell has written ten unusual and colourful stories of contemporary life. The brittle and deranged mundanity that surrounds us is viewed through a lens that is both extremely perceptive and ever so slightly flawed, resulting in both an inverted projection of the familiar and a dose of the alien. These are modernist, sparse and slightly subversive expositions on the normal that perform a disjointed dance with the world you thought you knew.