Fiction By Marcus Carab & Friends
Editor’s Note: You may have noticed I recently added a Verse section to Stranger Than Truth. One of the main reasons for this was to highlight awesome pieces of rhythmic fiction by Tasty Yumyum like this one about a great musical triumph.
I wrote this for a children’s book that my friends and I put together as a present for a newborn. Continue reading “Spadonkadonk”
Editor’s Note: The fast-developing saga of Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum continues with this rightfully bitter screed from 1975. It would seem that the first meeting between Tasty & Halton did not go well (to put it mildly), and the former felt the need to air certain grievances and commit the surreality of the occasion to permanence.
If you need catching up on this epic for the ages, start with the Editor’s Note and proceed to Tasty’s innocent introduction, followed by Halton’s seemingly innocuous reply.
Editor’s Note: Tasty Yumyum recently introduced his new project, Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum. We’ve seen the tantalizing Editor’s Note, and now it’s time for the first letter in the collection. Here we meet a naive young Tasty, writing a friendly letter to Halton Stoves with no way of knowing the epic story he was setting in motion.
Continue reading “Dear Fiend: February 26, 1975”
Editor’s Note: Tasty Yumyum has checked in with his day one NaNoWriMo progress. Don’t worry: we aren’t going to be posting every single word we all write. Some days, no doubt, we’ll have nothing to share but a brief excerpt—and other days nothing worth sharing at all. But everyone loves a good intro, and this Editor’s Note sets the stage for Tasty’s new project: Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum. Later today, we’ll also be bringing you the inaugural installment in this epistolary anthology. Continue reading “Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum”
…damn you right to hell.
Maybe some of you don’t know Halton Stoves. Consider yourself lucky. This man (and I use the term generously) once petitioned Webster’s to have his picture placed under (“or in the general vicinity”, his words) the definition of degenerate. Upon Webster’s refusing such an absurd request, Stoves was arrested in Booklore pasting wallet-sized photos of his ugly mug into dictionaries, encyclopedias and even in thesauruses (under the word “gadabout”, for the love of Mutt). His writing, while beautiful and thought-provoking, has been known to cause cerebral Herpes Zoster, or brain-shingles. I overheard him once in a bar calling himself a “modern day mix of J. P. Donleavy and the team who wrote for The Littlest Hobo“. While I couldn’t have put it better myself, I found it to be quite pretentious, especially when considering that he was talking to a gumball machine.
Continue reading “Damn you, Halton Stoves….”
Editor’s Note: Tasty has a way with the rhyming epic—here’s another lyrical tesserac that Yumyum himself describes “a Seussian exercise in cadence.” Read on and enjoy the ballad of Motorcycle Marley. It’s an uplifting story of passion, determination and thoroughly popped wheelies.
Continue reading “Motorcycle Marley”
That’s right, literati. The best author no one talks about, DBC Pierre, has just released his third novel, Lights Out in Wonderland. It is, according to Pierre, the finale of a trilogy. Don’t worry if you haven’t read the first two books seeing as they have nothing to do at all with each other—not characters, not theme, not even style, really. You should read the first book, Vernon God Little. You should run to your bookstore and order it (because they probably won’t have it). Then you should devour it and marvel at how Pierre wraps the story up with possibly the best ending in modern fiction. Then you should try (not as hard) to read Ludmila’s Broken English, his second novel. It is really quite good and if VGL hadn’t been so damned amazing, I would have truly been blown away by it as well. Then you should go back to the bookstore where you were smart enough to have ordered all of these titles at the same time and get two copies of Lights Out in Wonderland, one for your own brain and one as a thank you to me for changing your life by introducing you to such great work. I prefer hardcover, but a nice trade paperback would suffice.
Just got high and thought of an awesome idea for a story about a guy who always gets high and has awesome ideas that would make millions if he could only remember them the next day and act on them. He continuously gets high in order to remember the amazing ideas but never does and/or gets bored and watches Hell’s Kitchen or something equally ridiculous on the talkingbox. When he finally decides to take notes whilst high, he reads some the next day on a blogboard for amateur writers and thinks they are absolute shit. He gives up thinking his plans are awesome. He does not, however, give up weed.
Every time I run into a literary wall, my main character is going to pull out his weathered copy of Atlas Shrugged and read the giant speech near the end out loud. Doesn’t matter if he is on the subway or in Subway. Ayn Rand. Loud. In full. And, as the man hunched over the keys trying to tell you this character’s story, well, it would only be fitting for me to transcribe the speech as he gives it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing the character justice. I wouldn’t be doing my job. And goddammit, if there is one thing I take serious in life it is writing real life stuff about real life people and if my main character wants to read the giant Atlas Shrugged speech ten times throughout the course of my (huge fake in-the-air finger quotations) novel, well then, it is my right…no, my duty and obligation, to allow you, the reader, the chance to multiply the cheat-factor and just skip it (like everyone in the entire world actually does with said part when encountering it within the confines of said book). And if you, the reader, the general public, don’t like it, tough tittie. Write a chapter about it in your own book.
Editors Note: I just found this mystifying and super-fresh ballad by Tasty Yumyum in the post queue. It took me a couple reads to get the words to fit into my brain—I suggest you do the same. Read on and enjoy Salamander Dunderhead