Whistler’s Mother’s Son and Other Curiosities

Whistler's Mother's Son collects over 100 prose pieces of varying length and styles—from minimalism to satire to noir to children's tale to abstraction to surrealism. Featuring parodies, standardized tests, nursery-rhyme anxieties, fables, riddles, collaborations, conundrums, rescued clichés, abominations-in-training, dark Americana, existential misdemeanors, misbegotten mysteries, identity crises, optimistic nihilism, formal experimentation, and polyrhythmic prose, its cast of characters includes Hamlet, Gertrude Stein, Amelia Earhart, Fred Flintstone, Mr. Mondrian, a little girl whose mother takes up with a smelly old man, embattled aunties and uncles, a man with two mustaches, several hard-boiled dicks, and an eternally confused Peter Cherches.