Kuro Crow: Three Short Stories

It’s the end of 2010, the iPad is taking off and my friend Justin McLachlan has launched an electronic publishing house and, so, I thought it would be cool to publish a mini-collection of my short fiction as an ebook. It’s three stories (less than 4,000 words altogether) that I’ve always wanted to see collected as a chapbook.

Here’s how Boxfire Press describes Kuro Crow:

In 1999, author Dave Maass decided he was through with Phoenix, the flat, suburban sprawl where he was born and raised. He resolved to leave it for a place more, for lack of a better word, vertical. These three stories were inspired by his observations of Tokyo at the turn of the 21st Century as he learned to look up for the first time.

In All You Can Stomach, an English-as-a-foreign-language teacher on an overnight package trip to Seoul is derailed from his mission to gorge on Korean barbecue by his liberal companion and two too-adorable cult members.

Kuro Crow is a conversation between a drunk expat and a salaryman who speaks only the barest of English that weaves between cultural pretenses, Tokyo’s black scavengers and the disappearance of a young American hostess.

Primarily a spoken word piece, Whitecaps repeats the phrase “He kissed her because” in the voice of a desperate sailor who finds himself disgusted and inspired by his own voyeurism as he watches his mate dance with his “horse-faced sure thing” in a Shibuya night club.

I wanted to slap a Douglas Coupland quote on the cover, a comment about “All You Can Stomach,” when it took second place in a short-story competition he judged. However, we couldn’t decide whether it would be appropriate to use an endorsement for one short story to promote a collection that includes two others he never read. I tried to get in touch with him, but he’s a difficult man to track. Here’s the would-be blurb:

“It nails the sense of timesickness and placesickness you get in Asia—and the cultural lag and fog that comes with it.”

- Douglas Coupland

I don’t personally have an e-reader these days, but I know a lot of people do and even more will after Christmas. So, if you are giving or getting an iPad, Kindle, NOOK or whatever reading gadget, please consider purchasing Kuro Crow as a digital stocking stuffer through one of the following links:

Boxfire Press – $0.99

iTunes (iPod/iPad/iTouch) – $0.99

Amazon (Kindle) – $0.99

Barnes & Noble (NOOK) – $0.99