Microfiction set in, around and under the mythical town of Wytheport
Sometimes angst-ridden, sometimes whimsical, sometimes meditative, these short “biographs” depict the life and times of a unique place and its haunting residents. The Wytheport Tales draws inspiration from a range of authors: Dante, Carroll, Joyce, Eliot and Masters, as well as fantasists such as Cabell, Eddison and MacDonald.
” ‘Time is warping in the palace,’ Laurence Carr observes in The Wytheport Tales. And our nights and days are warping in these sly, canny (or are they uncanny?) poems. Most interested in the world when that world is changing, and by turns in-flected, de-flected, and re-flected, here fanciful, there matter of fact, Carr’s tales summon twilight presences from the edges of experience, dark, restless, playful, and urgent.”
—Robert Polito, Director, New School Writing Program
“Though it seems to begin in the land of Dylan Thomas’s Nightwood, it extends beyond that into wonderfully evocative, mythic worlds that strike me as utterly original in its language and pace.”
—Robert H. Waugh, The Monster in the Mirror: Looking for H. P. Lovecraft
“With The Wytheport Tales, Laurence Carr gives us a work that shimmers and twists, that undulates across the mind’s eye like a tapestry. At times homely, at others baroque, at still others nightmarish, the collection fits multitudes between its covers. I’m eternally grateful to have been introduced to a sampling of Wytheport’s denizens, and look forward to many return visits.”
—John Langan, Mr. Gaunt
