Three Ways of the Saw: Stories - Softcover

Three Ways of the Saw is a debut collection of contemporary short fictions that keeps an eye on literary traditions even as it pushes literary boundaries. With a stylistic range that extends from realism to the impressionistic, from flash fictions to longer forms, these stories wind through the echoes and disconnects of family, the stumblings of lost souls, and the remaining impressions of things unraveled. At turns brutal, angry, searching, and reflective, this jagged chain of vignettes is a book to be reckoned with.The 25 stories are sliced into three sections: 1) Black Sheep Missives: The self-destructive actions of the only son of an Irish, Catholic family, a self-appointed outcast. 2) Dischords: Ragged, ne'er do well characters out of tune with the whole mess of society. 3) Ghost Limbs: Shadowy imprints of longing and things gone missing. Welcome to a work of literature that doesn't shy away from the human condition—it embodies it.

"Though this is not a book of place, per se, there's a brooding, raw, rustbelt, jazzy, Motown energy that informs the sensibility and sound of this writer, fuels his prose, and gathers this collection into a compelling whole." - Stuart Dybek, author of I Sailed With Magellan "The sentences of Matt Mullins are hormonally-charged, jacked-up on the adrenalized rush of his adolescent and extended adolescent characters, boys and men, mostly, who burn the candle bright on both ends of the stick. This book is lit from within, the pages dunked in the holy water of booze and kerosene, the kind of electrified prose that could only be written by a writer who spent the better part of his own life playing live music in the dive bars of the American Rustbelt. Mullins has plugged his pen, his surrogate guitar, into a twin Marshall stack and has cranked the amplitude of his heart and song up to ten. Like a young Barry Hannah, Mullins captures a world governed by the notion that 'all things eventually come apart,' though not before he makes music and meaning out of what happens in the events leading up to what ultimately is lost." - Peter Markus, author of We Make Mud