The Good Worlds Are All Taken - Paperback

by David Gionfriddo (Author)

A crippled musician spends a feverish night debating life and death with a series of voices real and spectral. A futuristic PR man struggles to make a star out of a feral girl with a hypnotic voice. Members of a fringe religious sect try to wring divine mercies from the intercessions of a doomed plague victim. In this debut collection, much of which comes from the pages of online culture journal Paraphilia Magazine, David Gionfriddo's characters hunt for status, sense and succor in a series of all-too-familiar American dystopias, and find only uncertainty, disillusionment and a nagging sense of spiritual drift. The Good Worlds Are All Taken is, in turn, wavy funhouse mirror, Rorschach test card, and cracked crystal ball.

Author Biography

David Gionfriddo graduated from Boston College with a degree in English in 1983, and got his J.D. from Boston College Law School in 1986. His debut story collection The Good Worlds Are All Taken was published by Apophenia in 2015. His fiction has appeared in A Dream of Stone: And Other Ghost Stories (Apophenia, 2011), Antique Children: Revolt of the Underdog (AQC Books, 2011), the online journal Paraphilia Magazine and the defunct late-80s Boston fashion/culture magazine Recreational Vehicle. His non-fiction writing on music, boxing and underground culture has been published in Esquire, Conflict, Chickfactor, The Cyberboxingzone website, and the Boston-based alternative culture journal Version 90, which he co-founded in 1989. In addition, song lyrics on which he has collaborated have been recorded by Ray Manzarek, Roy Rogers, Shana Morrison and Norton Buffalo.