Songs for the Deaf: Stories

A little desert town gets a sexual charge from a crash-landed alien. A dysfunctional family tries to summit Everest with “discount Sherpas” and yakloads of emotional baggage. A teen messiah emerges from a game of 3-on-3. The stories in John Henry Fleming’s Songs for the Deaf, the first story collection by the “marvelously inventive” and “winningly satiric” author of The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman, put an intimate and modern spin on the American tall tale. Stories in the collection have appeared in McSweeney’s, North American Review, Atticus Review, 100% Pure Florida Fiction, and elsewhere.

A little desert town gets a sexual charge from a crash-landed alien. A dysfunctional family tries to summit Everest with “discount Sherpas” and yakloads of emotional baggage. A teen messiah emerges from a game of 3-on-3. The stories in John Henry Fleming’s Songs for the Deaf, the first story collection by the “marvelously inventive” and “winningly satiric” author of The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman, put an intimate and modern spin on the American tall tale. Stories in the collection have appeared in McSweeney’s, North American Review, Atticus Review, 100% Pure Florida Fiction, and elsewhere.

John Henry Fleming is the author of The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman, a novel, and Fearsome Creatures of Florida, a literary bestiary, and The Book I Will Write, a serial novel-in-emails. His short stories have appeared in journals such as McSweeney’s, the North American Review, Mississippi Review, Fourteen Hills, and Carve, and have been anthologized in 100% Pure Florida Fiction and in The Future Dictionary of America. His awards include a Literature Fellowship from the State of Florida. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from The University of Louisiana-Lafayette, and is the founding editor of Saw Palm: florida literature and art.