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Q+1 short works from the QUADRANTS SERIES authors EVENTS Q+1 is a bonus book included with the four-novel Quadrants Series. The center point in Q+1 is simply enough the short story: an elastic vessel for fiction, able to accommodate narrative arcs, whether revealed in a chaptered micro-bildungsroman, as in Robert Ashley’s “The Hardware Days Almost Gone”; manifested as computer instructions in Sumner Carnahan’s “Authentic Incarnation”; told through the unreliable dual-point-of-view narrator in Thomas Frick’s “Troubadour Awakening”; or, with a flash of epiphany, as in L. K. Larsen’s “Leave a Message.” By pushing the short story in these ways, the works demonstrate the realization of Frick’s narrator when he quotes literary theorist George Steiner: “Difficulty is the armature of meaning.” Certainly, many of the fourteen pieces in Q+1—and the novels they accompany—push story to its limits. And still the center holds. –Julia Goldberg
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