Now It Seems That I'm Not Here at All: Stories

by Suzanne Burns

You are in the wrong life, with the wrong man. This is a trap. Escape. You are in the right life, with the right man. This is a trap. Escape. In the surreal, macabre performances of femininity that haunt Suzanne Burns' third collection, nobody emerges innocent or unscathed. Tasha lives in a community that is mysteriously obsessed with a high-stakes bake-off. Junie constantly tries to impress a cabal of unsettlingly toxic ladies who don't respect her-until she suddenly goes missing. Elaine's life seems idyllic, apart from her cold, uncaring husband (and the many black cars that lurk around her neighborhood and cause people to vanish). Underlying the resentful misfit women and boozy tea parties of Now It Seems That I'm Not Here at All is the terrifying question of where-and who-we would be, if we had the freedom to choose.

167 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 15, 2023

About the author

I am an author from Central Oregon. After focusing on poetry for several years, which culminated in the publication of two full-length collections, Blight (Archer Books) and The Flesh Procession (Bleak House Books) I am now working on fiction. Future Tense Books released a two-story flipbook this year called Double Header. In June of 2009, Dzanc Books published my short story collection, Misfits and Other Heroes.


Advanced Praise for Misfits and Other Heroes:


"This is no ordinary collection. In Misfits and Other Heroes Burns writes of disproportion, excess, reinvention, and lack as a means of magnifying outward physical irregularities to better reveal the inner irregularities of her characters. Burns is unafraid to explore the dark territory of human heart where love and hate are twins for desire and dread. The many brilliant moments of character, language, and startling observations indicate Burns is a keen observer of the wretched and wonderful human creature. In Burns' capable hands the grotesque becomes achingly familiar: the misfits she writes about are us."
—Gina Oschner, author of People I Wanted to Be

"Suzanne Burns's "heroes" in Misfits and Other Heroes may at first seem just the other side of real, but in their obsessions with food and love and their stories' perfectly odd specificity, they're as real and credible as Americans can be, whether they're a tiny husband carried around in a bird cage by his wife or a woman who prefers to eat glass rather than dumplings or a couple attached to a dollhouse. Who would have thought that Oregon's misfits could be as deluded and cruel as Flannery O'Connor's Southerners and even more bizarre?"
—Tom Whalen, author of Dolls

"Misfits and Other Heroes shows what happens when relationships get downright weird between adorably flawed and familiar characters. Take a good, long look into Burns' funhouse mirror and find yourself anew."
—Trevor Dodge, author of Everyone I Know Lives on Roads

Adventures in the material world, enigmas of food, flesh, the fate of
names, Suzanne Burns's words remark their downfall, know gravity. Not her lightest ploy but feels its weight, not even this now but suffers time. Writing sentences love to death, but if these fictions be believed, Burns will have it no other way.
--R. M. Berry

Misfits [what an understatement!] and Other Heroes [ditto!] brings out the squarest of society's pegs and their tragic, funny, and ultimately moving attempts to find each other and carve out some space among the roundest of society's holes. They are as matched as America's tiniest man and the woman who understands his need to be kept in a birdcage, or as mismatched as sweet-toothed men who long for anorexic women. They are magicians and firefighters, chefs and the other characters able to "contemplate eternity over an empty pie plate." Burns writes that "the world remembers giants" but her stories recall to us the misfit in everyone: a very humane, if not out and out heroic, work of fiction. --Steve Tomasula

Reviews

[Victoria Gettinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful stories

[Matthew Meade · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have long thought Suzanne Burns has the dubious honor of being one of the most underrated short fiction writers of the 21st century. When I really want to be a literary hipster, I recommend Krys Lee’s Drifting House, The Strugatsky Brothers’ Hard to Be a God, and anything by Suzanne Burns. And you can too!

Now It Seems That I’m Not Here At All has the same eclectic mix of weirdness as all her collections. There are mean little stories like "Like" and "Four Views," there are re-interpretations of fairy tales like, “The Keeper of the Waldeinsamkeit,” even recipes re-imagined, like in “Cakewalk.” These stories are closed Pynchonian systems, punctured by angsty de Beauvoirian particles. Tuesday night bunko crossed with Delillo-esque post-modernism. (But… not so long.) Burns charges her fiction with bizarre non sequiturs, Kafkaesque cul-de-sacs and the kind of longing that only emerges at middle age. They squirm with the grotesquery of grooming habits, they writhe with the strange body horror of ageing.

But the real stand outs are her woman in the wilderness stories like “Kitty Party,” where rituals of suburban affluence are re-constituted into the stuff of late-stage capitalism nightmares. She takes the premise of The Stepford Wives and restructures it, repurposing it for the 21st century. To her credit, the stories never go where you think they will. Burns is so confident in her craft that she lets the characters get lost. And you, dear reader, are lost with them. How rare in fiction to actually be lost, meandering around the woods, transgressing, crossing thresholds into forbidden spaces. What else is fiction for?

Here are some comps:
If you like Kelly Link paired with how midjourney is destroying the art market in the guise of a fun disruption...
Karen Russell accompanied by how a skills gap is eroding this country from the inside out...
Miranda July with a side of phishing scams that ruing your life with the click of a mouse...
Carmen Maria-Machado with the an extra supplement of the crushing burden of existential longing...
And/ or Sean Ennis and the sinking feeling you have been lied to...
you will love Suzanne Burns.