Zen Pussy Riot

Zen Pussy Riot is the third volume of The Canvas Sextet series of three-minute short stories by Miles White, who is emerging as a prolific stylist of the still emerging genre of contemporary flash fiction. The 50 provocative, insightful, darkly comic and often tragic stories in the new collection – a follow up to Jesus Loves You But Not Today and Download the Moon – are bold, eclectic, sumptuously diverse and compellingly engaging, playing on the edges of the profane and the profound. “Love Potion Number 10” imagines a woman’s worst date night. “Radiance” is a macabre end to a woman’s troubled quest for racial beauty. “Night and Day” is a waking nightmare that blurs reality and the dream world. “When I’m Alone I Cry” is a brutal meditation on self-torture and the disillusionment felt by many Gen-X youth in America, while “|The Way You Move” re-imagines the dynamics of the wedding night when the bride takes charge of the marriage bed.

Like the previous two volumes, Zen Pussy Riot is unsparing and relentless in its exploration of the absurdities of day-to-day lives often lived on the margins, the vagaries of the human heart, and the contradictions of human desire. The stories are written with an intensity of language and storytelling that makes reading them both hypnotic and highly entertaining.

More about the series as well as commentary on the stories can be found on the author’s blog: http://www.thecanvassextet.com.