Ryan Quinn Flanagan is well known as a very talented and very productive poet, but he also appears to be a gifted writer of short stories. In this collection, his first collection of short stories, he tells with great empathy about special people. Often it concerns outsiders, people who don’t fit, who are different, and (therefore) interesting. Ryan writes about them in a very appealing flowing style and when you start reading in it, there is no stopping. Each time you think “well, one more story” and before you know it you have read all night and the alarm goes off and you have to go back to work. And the characters you have read about are so lifelike that they continue to haunt you for hours. Ryan wrote 31 fascinating, enthralling, sometimes touching stories with often unexpected turns and black humor and I made a drawing for each story.
