Mindwarp, A Novella

MindWarp has been named to Kirkus Reviews' "Best of 2011" list. The Florida Writers Association also awarded the title novella its top prize for short fiction in the 2011 Royal Palm Literary Award competition.

In this award-winning collection of short fiction, a deranged author turns a barroom buddy into his fictional foil as he warps his own and the friends reality beyond recognitionan ageless man sits on a rock in the desert on Yom Kippur waiting for a goat to be brought to hima shanty-town child saves and befriends a crippled rabbit hit by a speeding car, only to face the impersonal cruelty of modern lifea woman rides a bus in silence to her family homestead once a year, concealing her personal mystery from the bus attendant, a neighbor who grew up in her sheltering shadowa shell-shocked war veteran waits beside railroad tracks each day for his tormentor to pass

Kirkus, which bills itself as "The World's Toughest Book Critic," describes the work as a scintillating collection(that) uses offbeat character studies to wrestle with snaky issues of identity and self-knowledge. Quirky, opaque figures abound. (T)he quality of (Hberts) prose, his deadpan realism, mordant wit and acute powers of description ground his flights of abstraction in the soil of experience. A beguiling blend of high-concept narrative and old-school literary chops.

The entire Kirkus review can be accessed at http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/indie/richard-hebert/mindwarp/.