Onion Songs

Onion Songs is a collection of 42 short stories spanning the writing career of Steve Rasnic Tem, with an emphasis on the bizarre, the off-beat and the meditative. Here Tem confronts the big questions of human experience (ageing, death, identity, relationships) like a collector digging deep in the clutter of an attic and pulling out only the most unexpected and most telling finds.

His style tersely poetic, Tem is able to give fine reproductions of the texture of everyday life while writing with all the invention of unrestrained nightmare. The mindscapes contained here, where circus clowns cling to meaningless office jobs, skeletons fall like snow, ‘true unicorns’ rummage in garbage piles, and fires are liable to break out at any moment, first engage us deeply where things ache most, then compel us to keep reading with a beauty that, for all its strangeness, we finally recognise as human.

Contents:

• Onion Song
• The Sadness
• The Messenger
• The Hijacker
• Out Late In the Park
• Picnic
• Doodles
• Strands
• Night: the Endless Snowfall
• Archetype
• The Hunter Home from the Hill
• Shoplifter
• Brain of Shadows
• Attached
• The Rifleman, the Cancerous Cow, and the Swedish Memorial Hospital
• Jungle J.D.
• Cats, Dogs, & Other Creatures
• How to Survive a Fire at the Greenmark
• Minimalist Biography
• Sometimes I Get Lost
• The Changing Room
• Charles
• The Figure in Motion
• The Glare and the Glow
• Slapstick
• Strangeness
• Off the Map
• Unknown
• Saturday Afternoon
• A Visit Home
• The Multiples of Sorrow
• Fish
• Merry-Go-Round
• The Green Dog
• A Dream of the Dead
• Saturday
• Aphastic World Syndrome
• December
• The Mask Child
• Shuffle
• 12 Minutes of Darkness
• An Ending