"Scantic Books is proud to present a new collection of powerful, gritty short stories by award-winning author Bob Thurber.”

If You'd Like to Make a Call, Please Hang Up: Stories 

Note from the Author

A few of the selections in this collection were drafted 30 years ago, and they taught me how to write while I was writing them. Some of the stories later won a prize or garnered praise from people who really know their stuff and that instilled great confidence. Here are stories that broke my heart or fixed my heart, whichever was necessary at the time.

From the Back Cover

“Bob Thurber is lightning in a bottle. His writing reaches in and grabs your heart and squeezes it tight. Bob’s work is visual and emotional and beautiful in its poignancy. He’s a master of sparse, surgical prose. Wise well beyond his years, one wonders at his human insight. I would read his grocery lists.” - Vincent Carrella, author of The Serpent Box

"Less is more, and Bob's the best. Drink these stories like a fine wine, with their deep notes of sturdy oak and bitter overtones of sage, and a whimper of honeysuckle to finish. You'll crave more, I promise." -- Susan Pieters 

"Thurber's world is a terrifying world, an unclean world, populated by unclean characters, thinking unclean thoughts, committing unclean acts, narrated by an unclean voice. Only a poet could make you want to read that. I couldn't put this down." -- Jon Gluckman

 link to the paperback on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1679392522?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860

It generally takes a few days for them to connect the paperback with the ebook, 

which is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083CWH749

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And just for fun:  Here’s an old recording of a phone operator (clearly promoting my book.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOsrdddHOV0

Happy 2020

Bob
http://www.bobthurber.net/

Just Released:
IN FIFTY WORDS! 
(micro fictions)

An eclectic collection of micro fictions, each exactly 50 words. 

It requires no hyperbole or special boldness for me to assert that Bob Thurber is the best author of 50-word stories on Earth. 

—Tim Sevenhuysen, FiftyWordStories.com

Kindle & Paperback (94 pages)

"Bob has a unique gift for using subtle phrasing
and well chosen vocabulary to draw readers into
larger worlds, deeper characters, and more refined
conflicts, plot points, and thematic explorations than
a fixed length of merely 50 words seems like it
should ever allow. 
— Tim Sevenhuysen FiftyWordStories.com

GRAND BABIES

—What did you tell them in the end?

—In the end what can one ever say except  goodbye, god be with, live long and prosper. Every cliche I could conjure from my throbbing pulsating pain-filled brain.

—They held your hands.

—One on each side, yes.

—I imagine both of them remained till the end.

—Left and right of me, yes.

—They knew you when.

— Yes they did. And they knew me well.

—Let me finish. They knew you when their brains were raw, when new roads were still  spongy black asphalt drying in the sun. The constant rumble of concrete mixers made their little feet tremble.

—And the vibrations shook their tiny hearts in the heat.

—Shaking baking baby hearts.

—Yes.

— After their mother died you sang to them a silly song about dropping the moon on your foot.

— More groundwork. Yes. Another simple foundation built to last.

— They thought you were amazing.

—One night with no moon we collected fireflies in a jar and I set the jar on a fence post, then we walked thirty-paces holding hands with our backs turned before I spun them around and told them look, see, this is what memories look like.

—Think they’ll recall that night when they’re older?

—No doubt they’ll remember it forever.

—Babies.

—Yes. Yes they were.


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(For Little Miss Monka & Mister Big)

Universal Wrongness

 
After the loss of a child, the overwhelming sense of universal wrongness is so acute that you do not even have to look up to know that the moon and stars have fallen out of the sky.

Rooms

(in memory of Sarah Kate 1980-2010)

We bought this house

brand new, never lived in,

when she was one.

We were a family of three then

though her mother and I had yet to marry.

Her brother, my son, arrived

when she was seven. They

shared a room for a while.

Even after, he liked to

fall asleep beside her.

They traded rooms for a time.

Then switched back

and forth and back

and so on.

She grew too fast.

Children always do.

The rooms remember her.

(Originally written Sunday, April 3, 2011)

Daily Writing Exercise

As usual, he wasn’t paying attention, merely tapping the keys, simply following one thought with another, one word with another, when the ongoing complaint that was so very much not his life ended up on the page. It was neither an obvious condemnation nor an apology for his grief, but an understated, artfully subtle, declaration of immense sorrow buried within a stack of words, as deadly as ground glass in a sugar bowl. And with his name as the author, what else was he to do. He was not a sorrowful man. He had no choice but to dig in, sort through the words, rework the sentences, assess every phrase, weigh every implication, and hope to revise himself to meet the new standard. This had been done before, he knew, by other entities definitely not him, persons who -- in the service of literature -- had commandeered his name, assumed his day to day activities, slept and dreamed on his behalf, taken responsibility for his nightmares, and then gone on to become somebody else, someone far better. Now it was his turn to be constrained, his job to trace their path, stomp in their footsteps, and blur their collective impression until he made it appear as though some new creature -- not him, not them, but something far superior -- had marked a fresh trail.

The Search Party

The author with his granddaughter.

(For Sarah 1980-2010)

Just beyond where the paved road ends, in a rut of dead black mud, we find her shoe, the other glass slipper, the one she didn’t lose on her hasty exit from the ball. A few paces further, partially hidden in high grass, we discover her gown, or rather the heap of soot stained rags her gown had been fashioned from. No sign of the Fairy Godmother, that delusional old hag, who vowed to assist Cinderella every step of the way but never once promised the child that anything good would become of the adventure.

Also missing is the pumpkin that had been transformed into a coach, and the mice that served as a team of galloping horses. Beneath the rags is the lifeless body of the brown rat that had acted as coachman. His head is at an awkward angle, obviously broken, and his unmoving eye shines beneath the buttery sun.

One of us picks the thing up by its long tail. The carcass is stiff as stone. After a few sweeping arm swings the rat is catapulting toward the trees that mark the southern border of these hallowed woods where none of us is brave enough to venture. Not for the measly wages the king is paying us. Not for the prince’s puppy-love infatuation for a simple country wench. No. The investigation ends here. Now.

Even the king himself, who has fought a thousand battles and won a dozen wars, dares not enter these woods where witches live and monsters roam, where night wind moves through the branches like the voices of children whispering in frosty undertones, lost children telling secrets so bitterly cold any man’s heart would freeze and shatter in an instant.


(Originally posted at ELpress's blog The Outlet )

–Bob Thurber is the author of Paperboy: A Dysfunctional Novel (Casperian Books, 2011) and the recipient of numerous literary awards, including The Barry Hannah Fiction Prize. He lives in Massachusetts. Visit his website at www.BobThurber.net