Walking Dreams, Selected Early Tales by Mark Wallace

A man tries to piece together the events of the day he nearly died. Another believes that a friend has betrayed him, or is it that he has betrayed himself? A woman tries to escape the life she has known, but finds it following her. The eight stories of disorientation and metamorphosis in Mark Wallace’s Walking Dreams all concern characters who feel trapped and want to change who they are. The unconventional shape of these tales distorts time, place, and character to create an eerie and threatening atmosphere. The result is a series of surprises– some serious, some comic–in which the boundary between the real and the imagined breaks down. In the tradition of what British writer Robert Aickman called “the strange story,” Walking Dreams explores a world that is poetic, horrifying, and very much like our own.

Mark Wallace writes like an avant-garde poet who knows how to tell a good story. Or like a fiction writer who knows how to fill his prose with cutting edge poetry. You finish Wallace’s fiction with much more than you began with, the sense that your reading intelligence has been scrambled into a new kind of clarity, a new kind of pleasure that can only be fully sorted out over time.

Stephen-Paul Martin

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Mark Wallace is the author of more than ten books and chapbooks of poetry, including Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn’t There and Sonnets of a Penny-A-Liner. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His multi-genre work Haze (Edge Books) was published in 2004, and his first collection of fiction, The Big Lie, was published by Avec Books in Fall 2000. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications. Along with Steven Marks, he edited Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s (University of Alabama Press) a collection of 26 essays by different writers on the subject of contemporary avant garde poetry and poetics. With Juliana Spahr, Kristin Prevallet, and Pam Rehm he edited A Poetics of Criticism, a collection of poetry essays in non-standard formats published by Leave Books. He runs the Ruthless Grip Poetry Series and the “dcpoets” e-mail list in Washington, D.C., where he teaches at area colleges including Georgetown University, The George Washington University, and American University.

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