A Sometimes Ridiculous Process - Umberto Tosi
Sometimes Ridiculous , a new collection of my short fiction in softcover, has hit the stands (as we used to say in the newspaper biz). I won't feign humility. I'm pretty proud of it, and hope that I will be in years to come. The title reflects the squirrelyness of the stories, which flit among the branches of the improbable. It also describes how I feel when I read my own writing, and even when at the task of writing itself. My wry friend and colleague John Blades, the fiction editor of Chicago Quarterly Review and editor emeritus of the Sunday Chicago Tribune 's Book World, and author of the surreal, darkly comic, Small Game , did me the honor of writing a foreword. "Reading Tosi, ' El Mago '," he wrote, "is like a vertiginous trip on a combination magic carpet and time machine, the passengers generously fuelled with complimentary loco weed." I blushed under my beard at reading his amusing and generous observations. I've never gone f...