Christina Milletti - Watch out what you wish for: in these stories, tall tales have a knack of coming true. A mother's whim is granted when she disappears at the kitchen sink. Two boys bounce up and don't come down. A housewife conjures a light bulb salesman who materializes for dinner

Christina Milletti, The Religious and Other Fictions, Carnegie Mellon, 2006.


Keen, tender, at times perverse, The Religious and Other Fictions ventures into the uncanny zones of the imagination and renders them natural. Watch out what you wish for: in these stories, tall tales have a knack of coming true. A mother's whim is granted when she disappears at the kitchen sink. Two boys bounce up and don't come down. A housewife conjures a light bulb salesman who materializes for dinner.
With one foot in the real world, the other in the land of fable, Christina Milletti takes stock of the beliefs we harbor in the face of failed hopes, the power personal myths hold over us all. In this wonderful debut collection, our most private sanctuaries are peeled back, their hearts made bare, by an inventive new writer who Carol Shields calls, "a genuine magician."




"Christina Milletti has a knife-thrower's flourish and aim, a fiction of ease and ferocity. It's hard to tell order from disorder in her stories, the lavish from the spare―they meet in a super-clarity of language that is wondrous, as dark as it is illuminating." - Janet Kauffman

"A stunning debut. In Milletti's stories, the imaginary does not begin where the real ends: the two are intertwined, each creating the other. Be careful what stories you invent, for they may in fact turn out to be not only true to life but truer than life.” - Brian Evenson

"Christina Milletti combines the pithy with the symphonic while retaining them fused, and she takes her time, maintaining a total effect like a Stravinsky sonata. A writer of gifted prose is among us again." - Paul West




Christina Milletti’s stories are unsettles and transient, fables on the go. They may have nowhere to be, but they’re in a hurry to get there. How she ever managed to corral these rootless tales into The Religious and Other Fictions is a mystery for the ages.
The opening story is a traveling salesman’s myth, “Retrofit”, a story told not by but about a strange lightbulb salesman whose head grows in the telling. He wanders around without ever being seen twice, perhaps to “Where Noone Is Now,” the location of a vanished sister who may or may not have ever existed. The transience of the mail leads a woman to a world of imagined delights and magic doors, and lets a man open a strange door to the underworld and his own unconscious. Even names travel, moving between women and musicians with easy facility and glad harmony.
Not all the transitions are accomplished with such ease, or such happy results. The man who survives “Amelia Earhart’s Last Appearance” watches helplessly as the women in his life explode, vanish or fade into thin air. And the title story, “The Religious,” takes fact and fantasy along a winding and confusing road with results unsatisfying even for their traveling narrator.
But the journey is the joy, as both Noone and Amelia Earhart might have testified, and Christina Milletti is rather more skilled than the hapless travel guide in “The Religious” at making the travel experience a pleasant one. These are stories going nowhere in a hurry but making good time, allowing readers to find what they can along the way. It’s an odd sort of literary generosity and makes for a good way to pass the time while waiting for the next destination to come along. - Sarah Meador
http://www.curledup.com/relifict.htm


Gravitational Intrigue: An Anthology of Emergent Hypermedia, Christina Milletti and Dimitri Anastasopoulos, eds., 13th Moon Press,
has work by Mark Amerika, Christopher Funkhouser, Pierrre Joris, Stuart Moulthrop, Nicole Peyrafitte, and others.




Works in progress:
Choke Box: a Fem-Noir (novel); Erratics (short story collection), Room in the Hotel America (novel)