Frottage & Even as We Speak: Two Novellas

Fiction. This remarkable debut work brings together two powerful novellas that take a hard look at twenty-first century Southern California life and come up on the wry side of compassion. In a twist on the epistolary form, FROTTAGE collects letters from a patient to her analyst that plainly, sometimes shockingly, hide in writing what should be said out loud, piecing together a narrative of sibling secrets and their troubled aftermath. EVEN AS WE SPEAK takes place a few years after 9/11 and follows six disparate characters whose lives crash at the story's start. From the eco-terrorist whose disaffected wife has threatened to expose him, to the college student whose life is tragically complicated by her parents' love triangle, to the middle-aged accountant escaping an alcoholic lover all of them are, in one sense or another, on the lam. By sheer circumstance, they all end up in the same roadside gas station on the same afternoon, at which juncture their lives get entangled."

Author: Mona Houghton
Publisher: What Books Press
Published: 03/31/2012
Pages: 172
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.57lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9780984578221
Award: IndieFab awards - Gold Medal Winner

Review Citation(s):
Foreword 05/31/2012

About the Author
Houghton, Mona: - Mona Houghton has had stories published in Carolina Quarterly, Crosscurrents, Bluff City, West Branch, Oracle, and Livingston Press' TARTTS 2. Her short story Sex was performed as part of the New Short Fiction Series, Sally Shore, at the Beverly Hills Library. She has an essay, What I Learned from a Bricoleur, in Everyday Urbanism, edited by Margaret Crawford and John Kaliski. Houghton won the John Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction for her story A Brother, Some Sex, and an Optic Nerve, which appeared in the Summer Issue of Harpur Palate. Her story On the Other Side of the San Gabriel Mountains appeared in the Spring 2011 Issue of Corridors. Most recently, she is the author of FROTTAGE & EVEN AS WE SPEAK: TWO NOVELLAS (What Books Press, 2012). Her novella FROTTAGE won first place in the Inconundrum Press Melville Novella contest and was a finalist in Foti Novella Contest, judged by Aimee Bender. Mona Houghton teaches writing at California State University, Northridge.