#CopingWith is CCM’s interview series run by managing editor Joanna C. Valente
Tobias Carroll’s book, “Transitory,” came out on August 15, 2016 from CCM. Of the book, Laura van den Berg has said, “Ingenious and mysterious, the stories of Tobias Carroll are spun with quiet loneliness and wild surprise. Transitory is that rare kind of collection where each story stands shining alone and, in the end, forms a beautifully melancholic whole. Tobias Carroll is an original and deeply exciting talent.”
Listen to him read an excerpt below by clicking the link (and you can download it!):
Tobias Carroll is the author of the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms, August 15) and the novel Reel (Rare Bird, October 11). He is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. His writing has been published by Bookforum, Tin House, Rolling Stone, Hazlitt, Men’s Journal, and more. He grew up in Tinton Falls, NJ and now calls Brooklyn, NY home.
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (ELJ Publications, 2016), & Xenos (2016, Agape Editions). She received her MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, as well as the managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM. Some of her writing has appeared in Prelude, The Atlas Review, The Feminist Wire, BUST, Pouch, and elsewhere. She also teaches workshops at Brooklyn Poets.
“Espinoza’s debut is a searing interrogation of the world and the self at once. Here, the body is a fixation–as if to look away from it, even briefly, is to risk having it erased. As such, this is a book of unblinking human preservation, and how we trespass ourselves seeking safer spaces. “There is nothing I love more than an honest storm,” Espinoza writes. There Should Be Flowers is a storm to ravage and rearrange us from our crushing certainties. This book doesn’t need a blurb. It simply needs to be read.”
“Ingenious and mysterious, the stories of Tobias Carroll are spun with quiet loneliness and wild surprise. Transitory is that rare kind of collection where each story stands shining alone and, in the end, forms a beautifully melancholic whole. Tobias Carroll is an original and deeply exciting talent.”
“This is a gorgeous slippery novel in the mode of Georges Perec or Magdalena Tulli or Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi or . . . Harold Abramowitz! I read it with a tumbling sort of pleasure by a small body of water as a hummingbird with a purple throat came and went. It, the bird, seemed, in its hovering, to be trying to read Blind Spot over my shoulder. Is that why it kept coming back? One impossibly exquisite thing seeking another?”
“A tale of elusive revelations is rendered through interruptions and undercuts in Ctch’s Able To/Always Will. Like the thin lines of this snakelike text, meaning bares itself undeniably and a breath later, twists and coils back into the basket of the charmer. Every assertion is cast in excruciating doubt. Is it 4 am? Am I able to? What is sacred? What is an act? Whether we know for sure or not, we always will. Knowing while not knowing, that’s the paradox that drives this meditation on dialogue in the digital age.”