Q+1 — Robert Ashley

Fiction. Short Stories. A bonus book included with the Quadrants Series, with stories by Robert Ashley, Sumner Carnahan, Thomas Frick, and L. K. Larsen. "The center point in Q+1 is simply enough the short story: an elastic vessel for fiction, able to accommodate narrative arcs, whether revealed in a chaptered micro-bildungsroman, as in Robert Ashley's 'The Hardware Days Almost Gone;' manifested as computer instructions in Sumner Carnahan's 'Authentic Incarnation;' told through the unreliable dual point-of-view narrator in Thomas Frick's 'Troubadour Awakening;' or, with a flash of epiphany, as in L. K. Larsen's 'Leave a Message.' By pushing the short story in these ways, the works demonstrate the realization of Frick's narrator when he quotes literary theorist George Steiner: 'Difficulty is the armature of meaning.' Certainly, many of the fourteen pieces in Q+1 -- and the novels they accompany -- push story to its limits. And still the center holds." -- Julia Goldberg