Reviews
“Reading these stories I’m reminded of a Mark Rothko retrospective I once saw. Often the journey of maturity as an artist is a journey of learning what to leave out. Rothko’s complex surrealism eventually matures into single or double colored canvases; Picasso’s realistic drawings mature into simple thick lines and shapes—and writers such as Robert Scotellaro learn to say more with less, no longer needing the extra foliage. His work takes the leap into true maturity, mastering the silences, zooming in on the subtle moment at hand and letting that one drop of water tell the story of the entire world.”
—Nancy Stohlman, author of Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities
“Scotellaro knows how to mine human experience, everyday life, and bring it into focus on the page with precision prose. His stories are made of flesh and blood and bone, fully embodied human personalities, interacting together in ways that are wonderfully curious.
“Scotellaro is at home with microfiction. But he has also provided a place for many of his fellow writers to be, in New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, an anthology from W. W. Norton which he coedited. The body of his work, from poetry to prose poetry to very short fiction, shows his agility and capacity to surprise. He is a magician.”
—James Thomas, co-editor of W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction and Sudden Fiction anthologies
What We Know So Far
- Paperback: 80 pages
- Publisher: Blue Light Press (2015)
- Winner of The Blue Light Book Award
“Scotellaro’s flash stories, sentence by sentence, ride disjunction to dazzling heights of hilarity, hard won wisdom, and the sweetest grief. He is the sublime story teller of tiny lives colliding with big moments.”
— Pamela Painter, author of Wouldn’t You Like to Know and The Long and Short of It
“What We Know So Far finds, within the compressed space of its (very) tiny fictions, something deep in this earth, something that transcends. I so admire and love its focused exploration of seemingly small moments, because so much depends upon them, because some things just seem to matter that much.”
— Randall Brown, author of Mad to Live and Matter Press Founder
“These stories take us into small worlds full of big surprises. Here is human nature: glorious and victorious—thorny and unsettling. In What We Know So Far there is much to learn, ponder and enjoy.”
—James Thomas, Editor, Flash Fiction and Sudden Fiction anthologies
“Robert Scotellaro is a true maestro of the miniature story. His writing keeps me delightfully off balance, luring me headlong into strange situations inhabited by even stranger characters, then through some rapid alchemy making me care deeply about them.”
—Tom Hazuka, Editor, You Have Time for This and Flash Fiction Funny
“An exemplary collection of very short stories: eclectic, original, humorous, strange, profound, and always engaging; it reveals the scope of the form. What we know so far is this: Scotellaro is a master of the micro.”