A History of Sarcasm

Sometimes stories that I''ve used to mythologize my childhood resurface in my mind as actual memories ... Perhaps if you tell a story enough times, it will become the truth." This admission by Mark Greensleeves, in ''Some Facts About Me'', sums up Frank Burton''s sharp, surreal and subversive short story collection, A History of Sarcasm. The seventeen stories in this collection blur the boundaries between fact and fantasy through a series of obsessive characters and their skewed versions of reality. Among them are a man who insists on living every aspect of his life in alphabetical order, a girl who believes she is receiving secret messages through the TV, a paranoiac who is pursued by an army of giant lobsters, and an academic werecat.