From the author of the acclaimed novel Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, comes twelve haunting stories about people caught somewhere between love and madness. Simplify mines the often surreal terrain of people on the margins of life: from the man with a photo of Elvis bleeding on his wall in "Comeback Special," to the profoundly troubled boy genius of the title story "Simplify," to the family that must traverse "The Distance Between Us" to finally get to the truth about their son the murderer, each story hums with sharp drama, mystery, wonder, and startling humor. Simplify, the first collection of short fiction by Tod Goldberg, portrays a world where redemption, hope, and violence are never too far apart. Available now from OV Books.
Reviews:
"A keen voice, profound insight...Tod Goldberg's fine ear for dialogue and for the spoken nuances of social microstrata enable him to dispense with reams of descriptive background and cut straight to the heart of the matter. If sometimes his overwhelmed characters fail to fully engage emotionally, their deadpan delivery of jolting ironies reaches to laugh-out-loud heights of insight. Even the collection's title has a sardonic ring. While hardly simple, "Simplify" is devilishly entertaining." Los Angeles Times
"Tod Goldberg's collection, Simplify, contradicts its title: Goldberg complicates things, in brilliant and moving ways, in stories that live along the border between the mundane and the surreal. ... Goldberg's prose is deceptively smooth, like a vanilla milkshake spiked with grain alcohol, and his ideas are always made more complex and engaging by the offbeat angles his stories take." Chicago Tribune
"Everybody dies at the end of a Tod Goldberg story. Well, almost. The ones who don’t die — violently, through hangings, shots to the heart, slit wrists, drownings, murders — are left to deal with the emotional and psychological fallout. They are the mothers, fathers, younger brothers and sisters in Goldberg’s creepy, strangely sardonic, definitely disturbing version of Middle America...And that, of course, is where the fun begins."
--LA Weekly
Goldberg's best stories are told in retrospect, as if the narrators need psychic distance to fashion their memories in the most potent form. My favorite is "The Living End," a haunting account of the summer of 1973, when the narrator's older brother returns from Vietnam with strange scrapes and bruises; the story becomes a mystery that involves the abduction of a Native American girl across the street. This story has a stable nuclear family at its center -- not stable enough, however, to stave off the enormous forces that conspire to destroy its children." -- Washington Post
"Simplify captures a wide range of emotions and style in his debut collection of short stories. Goldberg has thought a lot about the human condition and the way our hearts and minds define us. He is effortlessly brilliant with his pared-down prose and attention to detail. In a society that is disinclined to contemplate our own deaths, Goldberg hits it head-on with no qualms or fluff. His stories will provoke and startle you. There is a distinct balance in each of his stories, giving just enough humor, thought and sincerity to the entire collection. It’s rare to find a book that can evoke such strong emotions within a single collection, however, Tod Goldberg’s Simplify is a force to be reckoned with." --Angela Stubbs Bookslut.com
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