My new short-short story collection, Do What the Boss Says: Stories of Family and Childhood, is now available to order from Bamboo Dart Press at this link.

Do What the Boss Says: Stories of Family and Childhood is a 40-page collection of 18 short-short stories exploring the adult-child dynamic. The stories draw from a combination of imagination, observation, and personal experience, putting the characters into situations that make use of fable and folk tale motifs, or exposing them to pressures in order to evoke the intense emotions of childhood. I wanted to try to capture what it’s really like to be a daughter or son in a world designed by imperfect adults.

A young Irish girl substitutes a cardboard cut-out for her presence within her own family; a daughter nervously visits her father who has now become a stranger; a naive, grieving schoolboy is tricked by a more streetwise young man; a child tries to impress her village by breaking the world record for stepping in and out of a doorway. This collection offers you a kaleidoscopic view of the pressures, conflicts and joys of childhood and family life: from surreal fables to memoir, to idiosyncratic realism, to supernatural tales about strange encounters.

Advance Praise for Do What the Boss Says: Stories of Family and Childhood:

“Such a perfect balance between free-wheeling imagination and absolute control of tone and character, shot through with sublime tragi-comic timing. A joy.” —Luke Kennard, author of Notes on the Sonnets

“Michael Loveday seamlessly straddles the line between reality and the absurd. The stories in his latest book are a juxtaposition of love and lunacy, a boundary where the logical meets the illogical, a balance of hope and dread as all the mothers and fathers and daughters and sons and all their doppelgangers stand banging, banging on the door, waiting to be let in.” —Nancy Stohlman, author of After the Rapture and Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction

“Step through the magic mirror to discover a version of family, but not quite as you know it. From the parents’ regular pillaging of pieces of their daughter’s silver heart to a child’s doomed quest for striped paint, a series of potent metaphors sheds light on a network of relationships and expectations. Expect some darkly hilarious but surprisingly intimate and moving moments in this delicious cornucopia of freshly minted tales and fables.” —Jacqueline Saphra, author of All My Mad Mothers and One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets

Here are two example stories from the chapbook:
This Be the Curse – The Journal of Radical Wonder
Silver and Blood – Fictive Dream

And a short film created by Dennis Callaci for the story The Glass House:
“Do What the Boss Says: Stories of Family and Childhood” – short film – YouTube

Available to order now from Bamboo Dart Press.