Just Outside the Tunnel of Love

Francine Witte’s flash fiction has been published in numerous journals and the anthologies Flash Fiction Funny (Blue Light Press,) New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (W.W. Norton,) and Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton.) as well as Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions.She is the author of three flash fiction chapbooks, Cold June, (Ropewalk Press) winner of the 2010 Thomas Wilhelmus Award, The Wind Twirls Everything (Musclehead Press,) and The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon, (ELJ Editions.) Her novella-in-flash The Way of The Wind (Ad Hoc Press,) was cited as a highly recommended selection in the Bath Flash Fiction Award. Her poetry chapbooks include two first-prize winners, First Rain (Pecan Grove Press,) and Not All Fires Burn the Same (Slipstream Press.) She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Café Crazy, and The Theory of Flesh, (both from Kelsay Press.) She is editor of Flash Boulevard, published by George Wallace. She is the flash fiction editor of South Florida Poetry Journal. She is a former high school teacher. She lives in Manhattan, NYC with her husband, Mark Larsen. ENDORSEMENTS'The stories in Francine Witte’s Just Outside the Tunnel of Love deftly skirt the boring center of love and instead poke and prod at the before and after of what it means to fall into and out of ... everything. She takes on the smash and smoosh and broken eggs of love. The language in this collection is exquisite and playful and mournful and sexy. Witte has mastered the short form. Pull up a chair.'- Sherrie Flick, author of Thank Your Lucky Stars 'There are a lot of doorways, portals, tunnels, windows, a lot of rides, vehicles, a lot of moves, movement, and moving moves to be found in these startled and startling concentrated compressed compositions of Francine Witte’s.''Just Outside the Tunnel of Love’s microcosms record macrocosmic depth and organic reach. Like the stunning snapshots from the Webb telescope these precise and pristine pixels, these immediate and intimate images pack and unpack billions and billions of years of light, calories of heat, stretches of space, and the ultimatums of time. All I have to say is: Hang on! Let go!'- Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana 'A woman falls in love with a potato, another woman eats a husband made of ice cream, a cat espouses a theory about why its mistress’s man left her. These brief tales of scorned lovers and shrewd daughters of swindler fathers are reminiscent of the nursery rhymes my grandmother read to me when I was a girl, the way Francine Witte’s pixyish prose skips and twirls, laughs then bares its teeth. With stunning dexterity and whimsy, Witte whips up so much delight and menace. Just Outside the Tunnel of Love is an enchanting story collection by a master artisan of flash fiction.'- Michelle Ross, author of They Kept Running