Assessment:
Overall rating (4 votes)
Recommended by Jim Zoetewey and 3 other members.
Adam Maxwell’s Fiction Lounge
A growing collection of stories, updated monthly.
Adam’s subject matter tends towards the surreal or at least the very least weird. His writing has been described in the press as a ‘Chandler-esque hard-boiled cocktail, stirred with equal parts humour, mystery, gut-wrenching realism, and trademark minimalism’, ‘weird, wonderful, twisted and witty’ and even ‘almost Fawlty Towers’ which is, unsurprisingly, one of his favourites. His first book, a collection of short stories entitled ‘Dial M For Monkey’ was published in 2006 and he won an award for his short story podcast in 2008.
Adam Maxwell’s Fiction Lounge
— contains some harsh language —
Tags: flash fiction humor short stories surreal weird
Links: review feed
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Editorial Reviews
Worth Reading
Writing a good short story is hard.
You’ve got to suggest enough about a character and their situation to get people to care, but if you want it to remain a short story you can’t tell too much.
Flash fiction is harder.
You’ve got even less space to create a plot, the character, or anything else the story needs to work.
Adam Maxwell does an extremely good job of doing flash fiction.
Even though the stories are too short to really get to know the main character, they are long enough to give an impression. That’s really all you need at that length.
The stories usually have unexpected endings, are often funny, and always tightly written.
To get a sense of them, all a person has to to is take a look at the titles. Here are a few: Doctor Starkey’s Monsters, Let’s Get Kraken, Teeth Like A Burnt Fence, Romance On The Buses, Along Came A Chicken, A Beginner’s Guide To Stalking.
If I have any complaint, it’s the the format. Like many people, he publishes his writing via a blog. Some posts contain stories. Some contain podcasts. Some contain links to places his stories have appeared. Thus, if you’re reading the blog, it’s easily possible that you’ll click through to something that isn’t a story. Fortunately, clicking through to the writing page will allow a person to separate the fiction from the podcasts and announcements.
Overall, it’s a great site and a good place to read if you’re in the mood for something short.
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Most Helpful Member Reviews
A Great Place to Lounge
I’ve only been a member of the Web Fiction Guide for about a week, and already I’m unearthing previously undiscovered treasures.
Take Adam Maxwell’s Fiction Lounge, for example. A beautifully presented site comprising a wonderful selection of short stories, essays and podcasts by the titular wordsmith.
Adam’s writing is brilliantly entertaining, and darkly comic, as seen in stories such as These Were Your Grandmother’s, Let’s Get Kraken and A Beginner’s Guide to Stalking. The author has a very clear and distinctive style and voice, and it is little wonder that he won the Daily Telegraph’s short story competition in August for his fantastically morbid tale, Anthropomorphic Taxidermy.
A site well worth visiting, and a writer well worth keeping an eye on, I think.
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You’ll love it…
As the author of this website it has to be said that my review is going to be biased but I just wanted to respond to the wonderful reviews the site has already received - Fanton and Jim I am really happy that you both had such a positive reaction to my babbling!
I just wanted to set the record straight over Jim’s review regarding publishing via a blog . . . every piece of code on the website, every graphic and every word in every story was crafted from scratch by yours truly. I don’t use blogger, wordpress or anything else. If I want the site to do something I program it myself. The structure of having site updates was put in place around 8 years ago when I first set it up and I had never set eyes on a blog (were they invented then?) so the ‘blog’ aspect of it is really just an update feed. There are many bloggers out there and almost all of them are better at it than me so I just stick to the facts ma’am.
Of course, this isn’t a criticism of Jim - there’s no way you could know how the site is built and to be fair I do try to mimic certain features of blogs when inventing new features for the site.
Having said that I have just done a redesign and taken these comments on board to try to make sure that it is even easier to access. I’d can’t wait to hear what Jim and everyone else thinks about it all . . .
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