⇒ Read Coffee House Lies 100 Cups of Flash Fiction Carly Berg 9781500439743 Books

Coffee House Lies 100 Cups of Flash Fiction Carly Berg 9781500439743 Books

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Coffee House Lies 100 Cups of Flash Fiction Carly Berg 9781500439743 Books

Flash fiction – short, concise stories as little as one page, and rarely more than four or five – is a form that has become newly popular with digital publishing. Carly Berg must be one its best exponents. She’s written a guidebook called Writing Flash Fiction that contains some excellent advice on writing in general. After reading it, I wanted to see whether she was any good herself. Having now read Coffee House Lies, I can report that she is, very.

These stories all, in some way, reflect the human condition. They can be bizarrely funny, as in Rock, Paper, Scissors – betrayal comes to light in a hair salon, and is punished, with scissors. Or Saint Jude, about a woman with poor judgement: “They gave an ounce of charity with a pound of moralizing, which made her so mad that one day she came home with the church’s most sacred holy relic in her brassiere.” Other stories are rather thoughtful; for example, in Laid to Rest, a woman carefully tends the graves she has made of people who are still alive – the graves are for her relationships with them. My favourites: Everyone Wants to Steal My Man, a masterpiece of revelation; Paris Blue, in which a maid in the Deep South takes elegant revenge on an awful mistress; and Loss of Habitat, a curious story that may make you think about people and animals and how their fates can be oddly similar.

Part of Berg’s secret is craftsmanship. Her chapter on writing skills in Writing Flash Fiction reveals how aware she is of what makes a good story: avoid exposition, sloppy dialogue, etc. (she gives examples). All that is put into practice here, to good effect. Not one of these stories has an ounce of spare fat. She also has a real feel for language. The last part of Coffee House Lies has a number of very short pieces, sometimes just a few lines; this is from Breathing Underwater:

The family danced beneath the Mississippi
Father and Mother slapped in pretty water rhythm,
Watershadow sister mimed the Mother.

... Mother-daughter swimslap dancers hardened to steamships,
windmill arms to waterwheels.
Hooted twin foghorns,
steamed off down the river.

Berg’s writing is very American. This didn’t bother me (I live in the US at the moment, anyway), but there’s the odd turn of phrase and cultural reference that might puzzle some people. Also, with so many stories in a book, there’s bound to be the odd misfire, and one or two are just too cryptic (I couldn’t figure out one called Triple Penis, Going to Hollywood).

I don’t think that matters. For every story that went over my head, there were two more that had me chuckling, or nodding in recognition. Coffee House Lies is really very good. It’s also a book for the way people read now – load it on your tablet, phone or phablet, and grab a sandwich and a story at lunch; or bite off one of these pieces to chew on the train or while waiting in a check-in line or a supermarket queue. These are snacks that satisfy.


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Coffee House Lies 100 Cups of Flash Fiction Carly Berg 9781500439743 Books Reviews

Officially peculiar set of stories.

And peculiar in a good sense. Carly Berg is one queer talent in the literature arena.

Coffee House Lies is a compilation of 100 bursts of imaginations across the skies of the minds.

Flash Fiction indeed.

The stories are strange, not normal and extraordinary. I've read dozens of short story anthologies this year.

And by far this is the most different one!

They range from being bizarre to that of a normal routine human mind to that of a remarkable streak of literature. Very sharp and quirky, humorous and sarcastic, these stories will depend upon the taste of the readers.
Different IQ folks will comprehend differently. The wavelength fluctuations of Carly's Wanderlusted mind is so colossal that she ends up writing this towering stories in such short pages.

I savoured seeing the world through the eyes of different people. And their obsessions.
One story was a case of OCD with the color Pink. Well, we all are cases of OCD with varied interests. Only some people are branded with the tag of patients and while the others continue to be called Freaks that changed the society.

Carly Berg has that sense of letting her pen do the talking freely. I bet you she is not the one to use backspace and crisscross some lines in a proofreading session. Nope, you read what she wrote on the first instance. Funny, weird, out-of-the-box, fearlessly honest - I am running out of adjectives in my pipeline.

You can read this while waiting for the boarding pass on an airport and look around for characters that match the description in the book. Some body is obsessed with their spouse, someone with a color and someone who is looking for unhappiness amongst all the joys of the world - right in that brew of people.

Yes, it is so strikingly vivid a book in terms of character description.

Verdict Thou shalt not skip reading this!
Clever and surprising.
This is such a gem of a book. It has stories ranging from insightful to weird to wacky. The stories are poignant, they can be silly, they make you think. Amazingly creative writer.
'Coffee House Lies' offers some great reading in short bursts - flash fiction. The stories are unusual, interesting, well crafted, and well worth reading. Ms. Berg put some interesting imagination into these short pieces; a fertile mind for telling stories. If you want to know who really killed Marilyn Monroe and JFK, you have to read Ms. Berg's take on it. Highly recommended. This book will keep you entertained for quite awhile.
There is more weird stuff per square inch in this short story collection than any that I have read in a long time, maybe ever. But that is a good thing. Thought provoking, creepy, insightful, highly entertaining.
This collection of flash fiction and shorts is amazing, a head-trip of impressive creativity. Some of my favorites ‘The Shirt Off His Back’, ‘Paris Blue’, ‘Your Valentine’, ‘Calliope A Tale of Writerly Suffering’, ‘Til Death, Apart’ – and there were so many other clever stories and snapshots I liked and admired that to list them all would resemble the Table of Contents! Berg is a talented writer, slicing open pieces of life, dissecting them in imaginative ways, and then presents each one in rich detail. For anyone looking to read a collection of flash fiction, I highly recommend Carly Berg’s, “Coffee House Lies One Hundred Cups of Flash Fiction”.
Flash fiction – short, concise stories as little as one page, and rarely more than four or five – is a form that has become newly popular with digital publishing. Carly Berg must be one its best exponents. She’s written a guidebook called Writing Flash Fiction that contains some excellent advice on writing in general. After reading it, I wanted to see whether she was any good herself. Having now read Coffee House Lies, I can report that she is, very.

These stories all, in some way, reflect the human condition. They can be bizarrely funny, as in Rock, Paper, Scissors – betrayal comes to light in a hair salon, and is punished, with scissors. Or Saint Jude, about a woman with poor judgement “They gave an ounce of charity with a pound of moralizing, which made her so mad that one day she came home with the church’s most sacred holy relic in her brassiere.” Other stories are rather thoughtful; for example, in Laid to Rest, a woman carefully tends the graves she has made of people who are still alive – the graves are for her relationships with them. My favourites Everyone Wants to Steal My Man, a masterpiece of revelation; Paris Blue, in which a maid in the Deep South takes elegant revenge on an awful mistress; and Loss of Habitat, a curious story that may make you think about people and animals and how their fates can be oddly similar.

Part of Berg’s secret is craftsmanship. Her chapter on writing skills in Writing Flash Fiction reveals how aware she is of what makes a good story avoid exposition, sloppy dialogue, etc. (she gives examples). All that is put into practice here, to good effect. Not one of these stories has an ounce of spare fat. She also has a real feel for language. The last part of Coffee House Lies has a number of very short pieces, sometimes just a few lines; this is from Breathing Underwater

The family danced beneath the Mississippi
Father and Mother slapped in pretty water rhythm,
Watershadow sister mimed the Mother.

... Mother-daughter swimslap dancers hardened to steamships,
windmill arms to waterwheels.
Hooted twin foghorns,
steamed off down the river.

Berg’s writing is very American. This didn’t bother me (I live in the US at the moment, anyway), but there’s the odd turn of phrase and cultural reference that might puzzle some people. Also, with so many stories in a book, there’s bound to be the odd misfire, and one or two are just too cryptic (I couldn’t figure out one called Triple Penis, Going to Hollywood).

I don’t think that matters. For every story that went over my head, there were two more that had me chuckling, or nodding in recognition. Coffee House Lies is really very good. It’s also a book for the way people read now – load it on your tablet, phone or phablet, and grab a sandwich and a story at lunch; or bite off one of these pieces to chew on the train or while waiting in a check-in line or a supermarket queue. These are snacks that satisfy.