A History of Sarcasm

Sometimes stories that I've used to mythologize my childhood resurface in my mind as actual memories ... Perhaps if you tell a story enough times it will become the truth. This admission by Mark Greensleeves in 'Some Facts About Me' sums up Frank Burton's sharp surreal and subversive short story collection A History of Sarcasm. The seventeen stories in this collection blur the boundaries between fact and fantasy through a series of obsessive characters and their skewed versions of reality. Among them are a man who insists on living every aspect of his life in alphabetical order a girl who believes she is receiving secret messages through the TV a paranoiac who is pursued by an army of giant lobsters and an academic werecat.