Brain-Defying Tales

About the Book

In this hilarious collection of stories, Byron Lanning lampoons everything from art, religion, ethics, politics, poetry, to feminism, and masculinism. He makes the absurd seem preposterous. A hypertext novel injures its readers when they click on the hyperlinks. A woman orders a Red Velvet Bomb Recipe at a convention of Paramilitarists, Survivalists, and Insane Boy Scouts. She thinks it costs only $9.50, but it actually costs $950. A Hassidic gangster Heimi Day of Atonement Spielman attempts to take over the bagel industry in New York City. Wild Voilà Fusillade, an artist who works with firearms, invents the school of abstract percussionistic art. The rooster Cock-a-Dude searches for an eerie suppository with magic healing powers to cure his dying father, the megafascist dictator of a pop psycho arcadia. Tannhoosier, a slam poet from Indiana, develops a new form of poetry called appropriation that raises the wrath of the Poet Laureate, and he threatens to take away his poetic license.

About the Author

Mr. Lanning has had a number of jobs. He has worked as a shepherd, a conquistador, a protagonist, the french fry critic for Junk Food Magazine, and a bathroom attendant in the portable outhouse of a collective farm.