Directory

An experimental flash collection published by Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2020. Many of the stories were published in literary magazines, including Meridian, Hotel Amerika, Map Literary, Heavy Feather Review, Flash: the International Short-Short Story Magazine, Gargoyle, BULL, and Popshot. Excerpts from the book are also included in Best Microfiction 2021 and translated into Italian for a contemporary fiction anthology published by Digressioni Editore (2022).

“Strikingly written and told with urgency…” Wendy J. Fox, BuzzFeed

“Christopher Linforth’s splendid Directory is composed of shrapnel selves, both aesthetic and existential, each shard sharp, concentrated, biting, brutal, devastating, and astonishing.” —Lance Olsen, author of My Red Heaven

“Christopher Linforth’s Directory offers prose that twins no others. Original crisp writing, taking its readers on an unforgettable journey, through portals of the unknown. A wonderful, surprising, powerful read.” —Kim Chinquee, author of Wetsuit and Shot Girls

“…refreshing at times, shocking, disorienting and puzzling at others, but throughout the entire book you follow a thread of tender humanity that begs you to identify with a perspective that squeezes, prods and stabs at the heart in a multiplicity of ways.” —Levi Noe, Bending Genres

“Directory’s rogues’ gallery of rakes, rapscallions, and rascals, of hoydens, harridans, and doyennes, gestures semaphorically at abandoned subjectivity. This is evinced in this collection’s recurrence of apparatuses, an unpacking of the colonization of the human by technologies, particular analog ones — pre-cellular telecom and pre-digital photography — familiar in the films, photography, and paintings of David Lynch.” —Sean Hooks, Necessary Fiction

“…what is distinctive about the book…its use of the story-fragment to both exploit brevity as a self-sufficient narrative strategy and to organize a series of such brief stories so that the result is a work that has structural coherence without strictly conforming to a pre-established form.” —Daniel Green, The Reading Experience

“Linforth’s elegant and powerful prose invites the reader to join a chorus of collective voices that explore questions of identity, the constant uncomfortableness of growing up and the painful legacy of abuse.” —María Alejandra Barrios, Smokelong Quarterly.

Purchase at SPD. And soon at Indie Bound, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, and Bookshop

Read an excerpt here & some interviews (3:AM Magazine, Fear No Lit, 12 or 20 Questions, Heavy Feather Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn) & a Story Prize Instagram & some kind words & a review at Bending Genres & a review at The Reading Experience & a review at Smokelong Quarterly & a review at Necessary Fiction, & a short feature over at The Next Best Book, on this list of Entropy’s new releases, & this BuzzFeed article, & a Monkeybicycle If My Book.

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