Two stories in this collection, “Vevo, Forgotten by the Mormons” and “The Prites of Abilene” were nominated Pushcart Prizes. A third story, “The Foot,” won the Phoebe Winter Fiction Contest in 2013.
Collection was inspired by modern-day folklore: urban legends, internet hoaxes, and long-debunked pseudoscience. The result is a highly entertaining collection of tall tales grounded in realistic details.
BOA Publisher Peter Conners described Habermeyer work as mixing “the unsettling void of Franz Kafka with the tall-tale skills of Mark Twain, and [he] tosses in a dash of George Saunders’s contemporary satire for good measure.”
Ryan Habermeyer’s fabulist style is similar to notable authors such as Aimee Bender, Karen Russell, Kelly Link, Italo Calvino, Manuel Gonzalez, Steven Millhauser, Amelia Gray, George Sanders, Haruki Murakami, and Zach Powers, winner of BOA’s previous Short Fiction Prize.
BOA Short Fiction Prize winners have led sales in recent seasons, and have seen outstanding attention from the NYTBR, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist, etc.
Habermeyer’s stories have been published in Carolina Quarterly, Fiction International, Adriondack Review, Fiction Southwest, Los Angeles Review, Mid-American Review, Fairy Tale Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere.
Carolina Quarterly and Vox Magazine> have interviewed Habermeyer for his work on fairy tales.
Can I write you while I’m away?” I asked before she got in the taxi.
