"YOUR SMALLEST BONES is an impressive,
memorable collection from an exciting and distinctive voice. "
~IndieReader, top-rated and approved.
memorable collection from an exciting and distinctive voice. "
~IndieReader, top-rated and approved.
"A short story collection that explores its characters’ sensibilities with delicacy and precision.
Intelligent, subtle, minimalist stories by a promising young writer."
-Kirkus Reviews Your Smallest Bones
DELICATE BONES, POWERFUL THOUGHTS
"Sean Taylor's writing is delicate and off-kilter, a carnival mirror that distorts reality just enough for you to question what you're seeing without doubting it. In his first full-length collection of stories, Your Smallest Bones, just published by local Seventh Tangent Press, a couple push a grand piano into the middle of a frozen lake until, "You can measure the notes by how thick the ice is, and you can tell that less than two measures ago you were safe. So you play castanets with your frozen fingers that sound as beautiful as breaking glass." But that's just a flashback. These impossible moments collide with the minutiae of the everyday, blown up by the thoughts and wishes of the characters living them."
-SF Weekly on Your Smallest Bones
"Sean Taylor's writing is delicate and off-kilter, a carnival mirror that distorts reality just enough for you to question what you're seeing without doubting it. In his first full-length collection of stories, Your Smallest Bones, just published by local Seventh Tangent Press, a couple push a grand piano into the middle of a frozen lake until, "You can measure the notes by how thick the ice is, and you can tell that less than two measures ago you were safe. So you play castanets with your frozen fingers that sound as beautiful as breaking glass." But that's just a flashback. These impossible moments collide with the minutiae of the everyday, blown up by the thoughts and wishes of the characters living them."
-SF Weekly on Your Smallest Bones
"FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS!"
"Your Smallest Bones is a compilation of twelve short stories about life and the incredibly small aspects – small bones, that are reminders of our human frailty. Primarily set in San Francisco, seven of the stories from this unique collection have appeared in various literary journals and two nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
For readers who are looking for a book filled with great, thought-provoking human interest stories, Your Smallest Bones is unquestionably your next best read."
-San Francisco Book Review
"Your Smallest Bones is a compilation of twelve short stories about life and the incredibly small aspects – small bones, that are reminders of our human frailty. Primarily set in San Francisco, seven of the stories from this unique collection have appeared in various literary journals and two nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
For readers who are looking for a book filled with great, thought-provoking human interest stories, Your Smallest Bones is unquestionably your next best read."
-San Francisco Book Review
"FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS!"
"He is a goddam great writer."
"The incisiveness of his choices in selecting the telling details, plus the eloquence of how he describes them are what separate Taylor from the dull herd of sheep writers, all alike from a distance and all sounding the same."
-San Diego Book Review
"He is a goddam great writer."
"The incisiveness of his choices in selecting the telling details, plus the eloquence of how he describes them are what separate Taylor from the dull herd of sheep writers, all alike from a distance and all sounding the same."
-San Diego Book Review
Promotional song inspired by Flight and Weightless by songwriter Bob Nanna -----> |
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Published Sample Stories from Your Smallest Bones
Flight and Weightless
How Josh Met Emily
What You're Waiting for
Where Pickled Jalapenos Grow
Your Smallest Bones inspired art produced by Molly Unquera
Flight and Weightless art by Carrion House
Flight and Weightless read aloud!
Your Smallest Bones is a collection of short fiction built on the sounds we make when we run out of sounds. Can you hear them yet? All you have to do is help an ex-lover push a grand piano out onto a frozen lake. You have to break both of your thumbs in perfect symmetry to grow up. You have to bind mattresses like books, with all the classics penned to them, just to get some sleep. You heard them with the smallest bones, inside your inner ear. Somedays, there is perfection in the quiet of your hands pressing play on the braille love letters of a blind man. Somedays, life sounds like an earthquake detector while you’re in the shower.
Then you hear your neighbors sounds. On the day of her husbands funeral, a woman recreates a stick-up from her favorite western. The sound of an eccentric marriage nearly lost to the mislabeling of coconut juice. Or in a tea garden after a conversation with a child, a man finds heaven as he timidly describes hell. Can you hear it now? Across town when a pianist loses his hearing, he paints the color spectrum along his piano keys to regain his favorite lost notes. Meanwhile, a girl next door carries a prayer, from the lions she feeds, into a song, for a parrot she adopts. These stories play the out-stretched gasp, they play the shiver, the hope whisper, and the buckling fear.
Then you hear your neighbors sounds. On the day of her husbands funeral, a woman recreates a stick-up from her favorite western. The sound of an eccentric marriage nearly lost to the mislabeling of coconut juice. Or in a tea garden after a conversation with a child, a man finds heaven as he timidly describes hell. Can you hear it now? Across town when a pianist loses his hearing, he paints the color spectrum along his piano keys to regain his favorite lost notes. Meanwhile, a girl next door carries a prayer, from the lions she feeds, into a song, for a parrot she adopts. These stories play the out-stretched gasp, they play the shiver, the hope whisper, and the buckling fear.