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I Call This Flirting
Copyright © 2004
by Sherrie Flick
Flume Press
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In an age when so much fiction
speaks only to our heads or to
our hearts, I Call This Flirting sings
equally, and beautifully, to both. The
pieces in this collection — some intensely
imagined moments, others novels in miniature
— begin in the apparent ordinary before
opening up and out through a series of graceful unexpected moves that
succeed in transforming readers’ perceptions in fewer than 500 words.
Risk-taking, passionate, and original.
— Ann Pancake, author of Given Ground
These are sinewy, deeply engaging stories, at once elliptical and satisfying.
I Call This Flirting is a marvel: each story is concise as a poem, yet the
collection is as seamless and expansive as a novel. Whether describing
small-town couples in the Midwest or adventurers in Central Europe,
Flick‘s stories radiate with lyric intelligence; the stories here are a cleareyed
benediction to love and longing.
— Paul Eggers, author of Saviors and How the Water Feels
I Call This Flirting is a collection of fever-dreams, haunted by desire,
grief, sex, and memory. These are late-night stories, told after midnight,
a femme fatale whispering sad and unraveled and lusty tales into your ear.
That femme fatale is Sherrie Flick, and she^-s a wickedly good writer. —
John McNally, author of The Book of Ralph
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Reconsidering Happiness
Copyright © 2009
by Sherrie Flick
Bison Books
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The two silent Ss of Des Moines beckon twenty-three-year-old Vivette with a sexy finger, a promise. So, in the mid-1990s, she convinces Grandpa Joe-Joe to sell his
Buick for twenty dollars, leaves behind her friends, her job at a hip New England bakery, and an affair with a married man, and moves to Iowa. Margaret, who left
the same bakery years earlier on her own restless quest, offers pointers from her cautiously settled Nebraska life.
In a story of lust and longing, love and loneliness, disappointment and desire stretching from the East Coast to the West, these two pioneering women navigate
through secrets, lies, decisions, and compromises shared over pool tables, postcards, and shots of whiskey. Starting up, starting over, slowing down, they
crisscross each other’s lives like highways on a map, always escaping, flying toward a dreamt future, and trying to avoid the charted course. — from the
publisher
To break off an affair with a married man, 23-year-old Vivette takes her grandfather's Buick and drives away from her home in Portsmouth, N.H., heading for Des
Moines, Iowa, for no other reason than the attraction of its two silent “s”s. On the way she spends a week in Nebraska with Margaret, who Vivette met when they
both worked at the Penhallow Bakery in Portsmouth. Margaret, who also fled heartbreak, is married now and settled down, and Vivette seeks “pointers” on life in the
Great Plains. From chapter to chapter, the story shifts between Vivette and Margaret and between the past and present, gradually revealing the details of their
involvement with the untrustworthy men they left behind. In her descriptions of food, the Nebraskan landscape, and the rhythms of work at a tourist town bakery,
Flick indulges in sensual detail with pleasurable results. — Publishers Weekly
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