The Pillow Museum: Stories

A collection of 56 flash fictions, micro-essays, and contemporary fables about the burden on women and families

The Pillow Museum is a collection of 56 flash fictions, micro-essays, and contemporary fables set in various simulacra of our world. Claire Bateman’s gorgeous prose captures the imagination with closely observed details of people and places that are startlingly familiar yet unreal, where nothing can be taken for granted, including narrative logic: ＂It was snowing the night they had the fight about the glass piano whose music provided all the light in the house.＂

In an authoritative voice that offers no apologies or justifications, The Pillow Museum evokes a closely observed slipstream strangeness that refuses to take any moment or detail for granted--a fruitful, delirious disruption.

Claire Bateman is the author of eight collections of poetry, prose poetry and flash fiction, most recently SCAPE and the collection Wonders of the Invisible World. She has received two Pushcart awards and a NEA grant. She is the poetry editor of Weekly Hubris.