A History of Sarcasm

Sometimes stories that I've used to mythologize my childhood resurface in my mind as actual memories - Perhaps if you tell a story enough times, it will become the truth. 'This admission by Mark Greensleeves, the compulsive liar in the story, "Some Facts About Me", sums up Frank Burton's sharp, surreal and subversive short story collection, "A History of Sarcasm". The seventeen stories in this collection blur the boundaries between fact and fantasy through a series of obsessive characters and their skewed versions of reality. Among them are a man who insists on living every aspect of his life in alphabetical order, a girl who believes she is receiving secret messages through the TV, a paranoiac who is pursued by an army of giant lobsters, and an academic who turns into a cat. Funny, dark and relentlessly off the wall, this collection brings together the best of Frank Burton's published work with some brand new stories.