CHRISTOPHER DEWAN READS FROM HIS NEW COLLECTION HOOPTY TIME MACHINES

Hoopty Time Machines: fairy tales for grown ups (Atticus Books)

Who Knew Godzilla Had a Poetic Side?

Hoopty Time Machines. It’s fun to say, isn’t it? Fanciful. Downright playful. Go ahead, try it. Say it out loud. Let it tumble off your tongue:

“Hoopty Time Machines.”

Just mouthing the words takes you to another time, a time when everything still seems possible, a time when you can stay up late with a flashlight under your sheets and disappear into the adventures of a good book.

Christopher DeWan’s Hoopty Time Machines: fairy tales for grown ups is a permission slip to adventure, an escape from the staid, workaday world, a passport to wistful, fabulist places, each one filled with peculiar dreams and wild awakenings. The stories include fairy tale heroines, introspective superheroes, and a whole menagerie of myths and monsters, but at their heart, each one is deeply human, and at least a little bit heartbreaking.

DeWan’s debut collection is “one of the most anticipated small press books of 2016” (John Madera, Big Other) and is coming in September from Atticus Books.

Praise for Hoopty Time Machines:
“Funny, sharp, playful zingers of stories that reach right out to grab a reader."– Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
 
"Hoopty Time Machines is much like a bag of M&M's, in that it's nearly impossible, once you've opened it, not to consume it down to the last morsel, and fast. It is less like a bag of M&M's in that you never know what you'll find beneath the candy coating: a peanut or an amphetamine, a rosary bead or a thumbtack."– Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Illumination
 
"Reading the book is like staring into a spiderwebbed mirror, the perfect vessel by which to understand our fractured, absurdist world. There are hints of Barthelme, Vonnegut, and Calvino to be found here, but make no mistake: DeWan is something gloriously new."– Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters
 
"An absolute delight from the first page to the last: it's like that scene in Singin' in the Rain, only with ideas instead of puddles."– Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
 
“That rare story collection that is both a total blast to read and a complete philosophical package. These abrupt, funny, vigorous stories—involving urban legends, minotaurs, little mermaids, chupacabras, and changelings—contain in their brevity vast depth and import. These are stories to read, reread, and perennially enjoy."– Sharma Shields, author of The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac

Christopher DeWan has published more than forty short stories in journals including Hobart, Necessary Fiction, Passages North, and wigleaf. His collection of domestic fabulism, Hoopty Time Machines, is one of the "most anticipated small press books of 2016."

Christopher has had TV projects with the Chernin Group and Indomitable Entertainment and collaborated on transmedia properties for Bad Robot, Paramount, Universal, and the Walt Disney Company. His screenwriting has been recognized by CineStory, Final Draft, the PAGE Awards, and Slamdance, and he is recipient of a fellowship from the International Screenwriters' Association (ISA). He teaches with Writing Workshops Los Angeles and the California State Summer School for the Arts, where he is currently chair of creative writing.