Matthew Salesses
I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying,, a novel in flash fiction, is a raw, honest look at parenting, commitment, morality, and the spaces that grow between and within us when we don't know what to say. In these 115 titled chapters, a man, who learns he has a 5-year-old son, is caught between the life he knows and a life he may not yet be ready for. This is a book that tears down the boundaries in relationships, sentences, origin and identity, no matter how quickly its narrator tries to build them up.,â€œIn Matt Salessesâ€™s smart novel-in-shorts, a newly-minted father flees telling his own story by any means necessaryâ€”by sarcasm, by denial, by playful and precise wordplayâ€”rarely allowing space for his emerging feelings to linger. But the truth of who we might be is not so easily escaped, and it is in the accumulation of many such moments that our narrator, like us, is revealed: both the people we have been, and the better people we might be lucky enough to one day hope to become.â€,â€“ Matt Bell, author of ,In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods,â€œMatthew Salesses has written an extraordinary and startlingly original novel that explores connection and disconnection, the claims and limitations of the self, and the shifting terrain of truth. Poetic, unforgettable, shot through with fury and yearning, ,Iâ€™m Not Saying, Iâ€™m Just Saying, captures in clear and chilling flashes our capacity for the cruelty and tenderness of love.â€,â€“Catherine Chung, author of ,Forgotten Country,â€œMatthew Salessesâ€™ ,Iâ€™m Not Saying, Iâ€™m Not Saying, is an absolute stunner of a novel. Told is short, sharp vignettes with prose that is taut, yet overflowing with meaning, this is the story of a year in the life of a complex and haunted, cobbled together family. The beauty of Salessesâ€™ writing here lies in his fearlessness, the emotional blows to the heart and head and gut heâ€™s willing to deliver, as if to say: This, this is life! And we are all, in one way or another, survivors.â€,â€“ Kathy Fish, author of ,Together We Can Bury It,â€œ,Iâ€™m not Saying, Iâ€™m just Saying, renders the messiness of life, family, love in its myriad complex formsâ€”romance lost and found, blood ties, squandered, unrequitedâ€”via 115 micro-stories that add up to a pointillist masterpiece.â€,â€“ Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of ,Somebodyâ€™s Daughter
Fiction,Contemporary,Family,Short Stories
I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying