num_pages: 138
description: I'm Not Saying I'm Just Saying a novel in flash fiction is a raw honest look at parenting commitment morality and the spaces that grow between and within us when we don't know what to say. In these 115 titled chapters a man who learns he has a 5-year-old son is caught between the life he knows and a life he may not yet be ready for. This is a book that tears down the boundaries in relationships sentences origin and identity no matter how quickly its narrator tries to build them up.In Matt Salessess smart novel-in-shorts a newly-minted father flees telling his own story by any means necessaryby sarcasm by denial by playful and precise wordplayrarely allowing space for his emerging feelings to linger. But the truth of who we might be is not so easily escaped and it is in the accumulation of many such moments that our narrator like us is revealed: both the people we have been and the better people we might be lucky enough to one day hope to become. Matt Bell author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the WoodsMatthew Salesses has written an extraordinary and startlingly original novel that explores connection and disconnection the claims and limitations of the self and the shifting terrain of truth. Poetic unforgettable shot through with fury and yearning Im Not Saying Im Just Saying captures in clear and chilling flashes our capacity for the cruelty and tenderness of love.Catherine Chung author of Forgotten CountryMatthew Salesses Im Not Saying Im Not Saying is an absolute stunner of a novel. Told is short sharp vignettes with prose that is taut yet overflowing with meaning this is the story of a year in the life of a complex and haunted cobbled together family. The beauty of Salesses writing here lies in his fearlessness the emotional blows to the heart and head and gut hes willing to deliver as if to say: This this is life! And we are all in one way or another survivors. Kathy Fish author of Together We Can Bury ItIm not Saying Im just Saying renders the messiness of life family love in its myriad complex formsromance lost and found blood ties squandered unrequitedvia 115 micro-stories that add up to a pointillist masterpiece. Marie Myung-Ok Lee author of Somebodys Daughter
language: English
title: I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying
publisher: Civil Coping Mechanisms