Working Titles
Working Titles
Welcome to the Massachusetts Review's Working Titles! Working Titles are e-publications of prose too long for our print pages. Working Titles will be published semi-annually.
Working Titles are now available on Weightless Books, a local, independent e-book distributor. You can also find all of our Working Titles may be purchased as Kindle Singles or Kobo.
Working Titles are made possible with the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Five Colleges, Inc., and the Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation, as well as private donors.
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In this darkly funny novella written and illustrated by Michael Dahlie, a young man finds himself in the small village of Toyne in 1974. There to oversee the semi-secret construction of a bomb shelter, he finds himself ensnared in the mounting tensions between competing factions involved in the project, befriends an eccentric variety of locals, and witnesses a series of unlikely events, including an unfortunate encounter with quicksand and a disastrous balloon outing. Recalling Edward Gorey's illustrated tales, but with a style all his own, Dahlie explores the quirks of small-town life with an edge.
Read an excerpt, and purchase directly from Weightless Books, Amazon, and Kobo.
MICHAEL DAHLIE is the author of two novels and his short fiction has appeared in places like Harper’s, Electric Literature, and Ploughshares. He’s the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Whiting Award, and he received an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2020 for his illustrated work.
