Raphael's Village

Pushcart Prize nominee, National Endowment for the Humanities awardee, designated Keeper of the Hibernaculum of Imaginary Hedgehogs, and frequent contributor KJ Hannah Greenberg brings her whimsical and peculiar vision to Bards and Sages Publishing with Don't Pet the Sweaty Things. This collection of seventy flash fiction and short stories will delight, amuse, and, in some cases, pleasantly confuse readers. Regular readers of the Bards and Sages Quarterly and Raphael's Village are already familiar with Greenberg's unique brand of storytelling.

Available in trade paperback and ebook formats: http://www.bardsandsages.com/greenberg


There is much to be gleaned from anthropomorphic tales populated with spacelings, with anxiety-prone rabbits, and with literate penguins. By placing our moral onus on hairy or on scaly beings, like the ones populating Don't Pet the Sweaty Things, we humans can safely poke at occupational hazards, relationship foibles, and never-actualized bucket lists.

More specifically, by reading about sentient hedgehogs, biker lizards, and intergalactic entrepreneurs, we can cautiously stretch our considerations of how we treat ourselves and others. It's less daunting to cheer on warring sugar ants than to confront a boss, to hope for the success of a Tuna Olympics contender than to give advice to an adolescent child, and to think up salutations for a space cowboy than to properly word a greeting to a new neighbor.

The stories in this assemblage include ones in which brave, spiky mammals face down fuzzy adversaries, postpartum tree hoppers work out libido problems, multi-headed creatures affect Earth's economies, couch potatoes realize our lack of preparedness for alien attack, and juvenile chimera chicks illuminate our cultural prejudices. Simply, the critters in this book are as fond of gulping down social codes as they are of devouring people. Accordingly, as these beasts scoot across these pages, they teach us a little about self care and a lot about heroes not always having to be ethically superior or physically superlative. They leave trails of slime, too.

Reading damp, modern fiction, such as is exemplified by Don't Pet the Sweaty Things' contained works, can help us grasp how to defeat the monsters within ourselves simultaneous with helping us cope with the ones we meet. This collection of outlandish musings gets us to reach beyond personal turpitudes, while still making for a night's entertainment.