Brief Lives Fictions

“ There are two clocks in the world, he thought, one inside the other, and it is that one, the smaller, that decides things.” – from “ Monday” In a garrulous age, here is plenitude by compression. Brief Lives combines the emotional density of poetry with the detail and drive of prose. Some stories leap at speed across time and place; others deepen around a single incident: a widow kills a bird and phones her dead husband; a teenage murderess grows up to marry her psychiatrist; a Bosnian man falls into the past while raking leaves. Room is left for mystery without loss of intimacy. Hazzard’ s distillations portray psychological complexities – self-devouring hungers, dry rots of soul, the little and large displacements that crack people open – through a lens as compassionate as it is surprising.

Keith Hazzard is a fresh new voice who writes in plenitude by compression. Detonations, like rain on leaves; like nothing you’ ve heard before.

I 3 Eros 5 Monday 6 Tormented by Circus Music 7 Incident 8 Salesman 9 Sweethearts 10 Ledgerman’ s Dilemma 12 The Enemy Knows the System 13 Fine, Don’ t Mention It 14 Actor 15 Twenty Minutes 16 Silence 17 All the Lovely Judies 18 Satellite 19 Sixteen Moments 21 Unheimlich 22 Trespass 23 Old Her 24 Coal Town 25 Untimely II 31 Cinephilia 33 Minot 34 Portrait 36 Diamond Guarantee and Lifetime of Value Plan 37 Respect 38 Succulents 39 Fort! Da! 41 Dog Days Rescue Sisal Delicious Finally, Sometimes 45 The Abiding Sea 47 Prime 48 Love and Strife 49 Reinhardt 50 Death is Not an Event in Life 51 Slope Road, 1980 52 Yazan 53 Therapy 55 Landscape 56 Midnattssol 57 Celia in the Early Morning 59 When I Fell for You III 65 Migrants 68 McGinnis 69 Revanche 70 Delaware 72 Teleology 73 Everything Looks Fine at the End of the Street 75 Cistercian 76 All Hallows 78 Glove 79 Trust 81 Mother 82 Laundry 84 Sideways in Mexico 86 Together 87 Stigma 89 In Vivo 91 Wild 92 Vjec?an 93 Wolf Hour 94 Kairos