All the Day’s Sad Stories, by Tina May Hall. May 2009

5 3/8" × 8 5/16" × 98 pp.

$8.00 US Out of print

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“In precise, beautifully-rendered language, Tina May Hall subtly sketches the ups and downs of a woman trying to get pregnant and the way her life is impacted by the flutter of the world and the rhythm of life: internet poker, minor infidelity, fights over mail-order seedlings, hurricanes, and a series of mysterious ×s appearing on her house. Honest, unflinching, and very human, All the Day’s Sad Stories is an impressive and worthy debut.”

Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain and Last Days

“The turning of the seasons, the failure of a pregnancy, a marriage rattled by frail income and shabby infidelity—All the Day’s Sad Stories strings minute episodes into a bead necklace of a novella. I sat down to read a few pages, and before I knew it, I had finished the whole thing, never having moved out of my chair. The delicate, fragmentary narrative nevertheless heaves the weight of an entire troubled year.”

Angela Woodward, author of The Human Mind

“All the Day’s Sad Stories is a masterwork in miniature, a beautifully chiseled book of vignettes that blurs the line between the prose poem and the short story while managing to produce an arc of feeling that most novels lack. Tina May Hall is, at heart, a lyric poet of mood and image who realizes that each sentence is an acoustical event. Take this book into a quiet place, because even the spaces between words make the most exquisite of sounds.”

Peter Markus, author of Bob, or Man on Boat

Tina May Hall’s All the Day’s Sad Stories was chosen by Brian Evenson as the winning manuscript in the 2008 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, and is our first-ever fiction chapbook. With a sharp, careful eye, Hall renders a year in the life of a couple daunted by crises of love, fear, and the uncertain future, one perfectly-crafted sentence at a time. Her attention to detail beyond compare, her syntax rhythmic and resonant, her narrative jutting forth in prose-poetic bursts, Hall paints a world of plastic, everyday modernity in cosmic dischord; a world clearly our own, but with a perspective that turns everything—an egg timer, a cicada, a chalked × on the sidewalk—into signposts of the unfamiliar, alien, and haunted. Mel Stringer’s cover image, a portrait of singer Holly Throsby, was chosen by Hall herself; it’s a perfect fit, suggesting in equal measure the story and the process that brought it to life.

Acknowledgments
Text Copyright 2009 Tina May Hall. Cover image “Portrait of Holly Throsby” Copyright 2009 Mel Stringer. Used by permission.