Bøker av Conrad Bishop

A melange of micro-fictions, from one to four pages each. Bonsai stories. Haiku novels. Flash epics. A fledgling Boy Scout is jammed in mud. A woman, two strikes down, opens the door to new love. A stairway goes up and up and up. Howdy Doody is roasted on a griddle. An elderly couple becomes famous, for no reason whatsoever. A small child boards a toy train. A man tries desperately to get to sleep; another, on the way to an urgent appointment, climbs upward and upward and upward. A woman wakes up happy and can't shake it. Hell comes to the suburbs. A VISIT TO LIFE is a mix of the comic and grim, a surreal soup in the kitchen sink, a speedway of speed bumps. It all comes in a mix, like life. So these pieces don't reflect a consistent point of view, or if they do, the POV is vastly diverse. Life is horrible, life is sweet. Life is stark nuts, life is just what it is. Life is definitely worth a visit. With his mate Elizabeth Fuller, Conrad Bishop has written 40+ plays, hundreds of sketches, andsix novels. His plays have been staged Off-Broadway, in regional theatres, and in thousands of their own tour showings in 38 states. He is twice winner of writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A diverse melange of micro-fictions, from 4.80 to 950 wordseach. Lives in miniature. Bonsai novels . A man wins his dream vacation to Omaha, a woman dies, a child drives a maniac bus, a student pushes the limits of algebra, old women play checkers, it rains for forty days, and the swallows nest in the chimney. Flashes & Floaters is a mix of the serious and the farcical, the surreal and the real, a series of skidding U-turns within thefamiliar drive-and like most days, it all comes in a mix. With his mate Elizabeth Fuller,Conrad Bishop has written 40+ plays, hundreds of sketches, and five novels. His plays have been produced Off-Broadway, in regional theatres, and in thousands of their own performances nationwide. Their public radio series have been heard nationally, and he is twice winner of writing fellowships from the NationalEndowment for the Arts.

At the behest of his patron, a medieval scribe narrates his ordeal as an inquisitive, befuddled six-year-old on tour with his family troupe of players. Performing their farces across a landscape of war, plague, religious strife and feral cats, they travel from sunny Greece into the uncharted north, playing market fairs and noblemen's banquets, while transporting a hamper of curse-bearing masks that intrude themselves into the boy's dreams and the troupe's reality, culminating in a Nordic Armageddon. Though set in Late Antiquity, it's based on the authors' own experience as a family of traveling players with an offbeat mix of farce and tragedy: playing for gods, playing for peasants, playing for cats. It's about carrying the curses bequeathed by previous generations, dealing with catcalls and calamities, improvising making sense of the fears that provoke self-destruction and improvising the strategies of daily survival.

It's a monstrous maze of a mansion, built by a grief-ridden heiress. A tour guide, about to retire, has given his spiel for so many years that he's gone blind. On this last tour, he's slammed with second sight.He sees the ghosts he's always felt were there: the bedeviled heiress, her servants, and a young carpenter who lands his dream job only to become a lifelong slave to her obsession. The workman's wife makes it to shore, but he's cast adrift.And the tour guide comes home to his cat.