James W. Hall's Blog

Over Exposure and Six Other Stories (including the Edgar Award winning “The Catch”

I’ve been writing short stories for over forty years. My early stories were collected in a book that W.W. Norton published in 1990 titled “Paper Products.” Those stories were written mostly when I was in my twenties and thirties and were heavily influenced by the metafictionists back then, people like Vonnegut, Brautigan, Coover and Barth. They were fanciful and strange and surreal, written in a style that was self-consciously poetic.

The stories I began to write in my later years were more influenced by Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard and John D. MacDonald, though they retained some of the same fanciful and strange and slightly surreal qualities I’d employed decades earlier.

The short stories in Over Exposure include two stories that were nominated for the Edgar Award in short fiction, one of which actually won in 2005. The others were all written for a variety of anthologies of crime fiction over the last few years, one about tennis, one about a geriatric hitmen, and another about a scary fishing trip, and one about a man’s obsession with a nude photograph.

Why an ebook? As the publishing marketplace has radically changed in recent years, publishers have found it less and less profitable to publish collections of short fiction, so I’ve turned to this new format to give these stories a home.

I’m passionate about these tight, dark, twisted yarns. I think they contain some of the best writing I’ve ever done. It was a labor of love to put them together in this package and to make them available under one electronic cover.

It’s a new exciting era we’re living in. Songs from iTunes, books from e-publishers. Though I’ll always love to turn the pages of my hardback books, and always enjoy their heft in my hands, I must say I see many advantages to this new form of reading. For one thing, a book can stay alive in cyberspace in a way that it never could in the old world of publishing where paperbacks were shredded and hardbacks remaindered and eventually ended up in the landfill.

Over Exposure contains stories of lust gone out of control, and obsession and murderous envy and other dark passions. There are surprises and twists and moments of danger and violence. I believe there are also moments of redemption and grace in these works of fiction. Moments that lifted me up when I wrote them, and I hope will lift you up as you turn the electronic pages.

You can buy the collection of stories at several online retailers, all for $2.99:

Like Kindle

Or the Nook

Or everything else.