The Immediacy of Emotional Kerfuffles

By KJ Hannah Greenberg

Pushcart Prize nominee, National Endowment for the Humanities awardee, and designated Keeper of the Hibernaculum of Imaginary Hedgehogs KJ Hannah Greenberg presents The Immediacy of Emotional Kerfuffles, a spellbinding collection of eighty speculative flash fiction and short fiction offerings. If you like your literary fiction sprinkled with friendly insanity, or if you prefer your contemporary fantasy to resonate with profound realism, or if you simply enjoy reading about anthropomorphic critters and everyday people in unusual situations both mundane and bizarre, this collection is for you.

"KJ’s short stories will immerse you in a river of humanity. You will swim with wild things, bob alone in balmy calm backwaters, struggle through raging torrents, meander in mud, and ultimately be pushed into a speculative ocean of desire for more."

Ion Newcombe, editor, AntipodeanSF

"A collection of stories that's as brave as it is entertaining and insightful. KJ Hannah Greenberg is one of the world's most naturally gifted writers, able to capture moments and emotions in time and inject them effortlessly into your soul.

Leave this book at your peril; absorb it like it's the last book you'll ever read. "

Colin Galbraith, editor, The Ranfurly Review

"Greenberg has really come into her own in the last few years. She's a rising star and "Kerfuffles" only drives that home. Definitely a must read."

E.S. Wynn, editor, Weirdyear

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bards and Sages
• Release date: Nov 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311556431

KJ Hannah Greenberg

KJ Hannah Greenberg used to be an academic. She earned a Ph.D. in rhetoric and specialized in communication ethics. As well, Hannah was a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar at Princeton University and a reviewer for The American Journal of Semiotics.Upon moving to Israel, Hannah morphed into a creative writer.Subsequently, she was nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize inLiterature and once for The Best of the Net in Literature. Among hermany books are the essay collections:Tosh: Select Trash and Bosh of Creative Writing (Crooked Cat Books, 2017)Dreams are for Coloring Books: Midlife Marvels (Seashell Books, 2017)Word Citizen: Uncommon Thoughts on Writing, Motherhood & Life in Jerusalem (Tailwinds Press, 2015)Jerusalem Sunrise (Imago Press, 2015)Oblivious to the Obvious: Wishfully Mindful Parenting (French Creek Press, 2010)Conversations on Communication Ethics (Praeger, 1991)Simple Gratitudes (Propertius Press, 2018, Forthcoming)Rivka Gross née Greenberg is a full-time mother, a full-time teacher, and a full-time graduate student. In her spare time, she writes across the spectrum about both real and imagined aspects of life. Her work can be found in The Jerusalem Post, Chabad.org, Tachlis Magazine, and in books such as Jerusalem Sunrise (Imago Press, 2015).

Reviews for The Immediacy of Emotional Kerfuffles

[wandering_star_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Oh my good god. This was an Early Reviewer book, so I felt that I had to give it a decent go. If it wasn't for that, I'd have ditched it at the author's preface, one line of which read By using brief tales to vivisect marriage, family units, friendship, and passing fancies, we can: reify our ideas, celebrate the meaning we assign to our mentations, and explicate some of the responses we have to our notions' actualizations. (Seriously, publisher - what were you thinking?).If I'd made it through that, page one of the first story would have once again made me hurl the book from me, as someone is trying to write a speech for a wedding and we hear "he meant to scribe that.... he penned that..." I thought it's sometime at school that you learn that you don't need to stretch desperately to find different words to describe the same simple action. However, given the responsibility to review the book, I decided I had to get through 10% of it. This would have taken me to p24. I couldn't quite manage it. I did make it through to p22, the end of the fourth story in the book. What made me finally stop? It wasn't the fact that on a single page of this story, the main character was described as "the matron... the professor... the scholar... the intellectual". I could just about get through that by this point. No, it was the fact that at the end of the story I realised that I didn't have a clue what the point of the story was. Not that I understood it and was rolling my eyes because it was so irritating - as with the previous three stories. No, I just didn't get it at all. If only it was possible to give a book a quarter star.

[sean191 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

So I don't have a lot of good to say about this book. It didn't invite me in as a reader, but it wasn't because it was challenging or thought-provoking. The writing seemed pretentious. Greenberg uses an extensive vocabulary in a way that didn't really move things along, but seemed like more of a showing-off attempt. While that's problematic, the extensive typos make it unforgivable to me. I also didn't think the mention of hedgehogs in most of the stories in the collection made it quirky or funny since they often seemed so forced and there just for the sake of a gimmick. I just really, really did not enjoy this collection of short stories and I'm not sure who the audience would be for this.

[kathywoodall · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In her preface Ms. Greenberg provides a kind of mission statementfor her collection of short-shorts: “Small fictions, like the eighty stories constituting The Immediacy of Emotional Kerfuffles [commotions], make for great means to explore ourpathos, to unabashedly strip away old-fashioned prejudices, andeven to dally at the bizarre edges of living.” Her themes providethe usual contemporary sources of pathos--loveless marriages, midlife crises, failed careers and dreams, and terminal illnesses--but her self-consciously literary narrative technique is indeedbizarre and, in most cases, deprives her characters of the humansympathy the reader would like to grant them.Fantasy stories involve people, animals, or situations thatwould not be encountered in real life but are told in a plausiblyrealistic way. In contrast, Ms. Greenberg’s tales involve the realistic stuff of everyday life told in a less than believable,often incoherent manner. As nonsense it fails to be playful, andas dry, subtle humor (if that is her intent) it fails to be amus-ing. One of the worst offenders (brace yourself) was “BakingCookies, Counting Cheshire Cats, Espousing Classical Rhetoric,Raising Rabbits, and Signing off from Cancer” about a dying womanwho has tried to juggle being an academic, housewife, and mother.Unfortunately, Mr. Ears, the family’s sick rabbit who turned outto be “preggers,” was the only one I could understand or feel anything for.In a few of her offerings, Ms. Greenberg allows us to put awayour unabridged dictionaries and enjoy a moving story told in a plain, lucid style: “Earlop’s Secrets” and “The Milkmaid’s Prayer”are examples. This is a collection to browse selectively.