I’ve been reading and enjoying Joe Young’s microfiction for years now. He can do more in 50 words than any writer I know. The tiny stories in Easter Rabbit are complete and whole, with language that surprises and never grows stale.
Mary Miller, author of Big World
What’s disarming is how effective these stories are in Easter Rabbit. You expect something so terse to feel incomplete, a mere piece of some greater whole, but the stories, moments, relationships, and feelings in these 100 pages end up saying all they need to in an artfully precise use of language.
Baltimore City Paper
These stories tick along with such sentences until the camera starts to melt: the world suddenly understood not through mimetic language but through the imposition of imagination. Conversations invent machines, a spider bite invents a vision of God … Their job is to permute our circumstances and our language until they’ve uncovered new ways to make our world mysterious again.
Mike Young, NOÖ Journal
It’s tempting to compare Joseph’s marvelous collection of microfictions to many things, miniature portraits, maybe, or model ships inside bottles, or flashes of lives glimpsed through windows in the night. But when writing is as honest and true as this, it seems wrong to call it anything but what it is: very very short, very very good stories, each one grasping at “starlight . . . out of reach” with “small and smaller tries.”
Pasha Malla, author of The Withdrawal Method
Those who liked their fiction well-defined or gobbled up and forgotten after a single reading, will find Easter Rabbit vexing. But in its open-ended form, in its prism-like prose, this is one book that the reader can return to again and again to see new meanings. In that sense, I believe the book is worth far more than its price.
David Woodruff, The Short Review
The bottom line is that Young takes situations that seem, mostly, fairly mundane, and breathes meaning into them. A man sees a black rat running through the leaves and this becomes a beautiful moment.
CL Bledsoe, Ghoti Magazine
With their directness and precision, their attention to what Ezra Pound would call “luminous details,” Joseph Young’s microfictions might be mistaken for Imagist poems, but with their shift away from showing “things” as “things” toward “things” as something else, or, rather, toward portraying both the “thingness” of the thing and of some different “thing,” his miniatures suggest something altogether different.
John Madera, New Pages
These are not stories in the traditional sense and I can’t really compare this writing to any other, which is a very good thing. I feel both smarter and dumber reading Joseph Young’s work, but ultimately I feel … nourished. Because he brings to writing what I go to writing for and that is the beauty and depth of a true artist.
Kathy Fish, JMWW
The relationship between text and reader becomes transactional, how much are we willing to give and how much do we want to take. The small texts draw us in and the white space requires us to go beyond the page, beyond the comfort of the words and to our own black box.
Megan Lavelle, BMoreArt
Something will sneak up on you [in these stories], something long forgotten, the back of your head will fall out and you will remember the time you took that big breath and really felt the heaviness of all your surroundings.
David Peak, Ghost Factory
Easter Rabbit takes words and makes them mean more, makes them hit us harder, makes us see better how language functions in short breaths, in gasps, in tight fists.
JA Tyler, Rumble
This is an IMPORTANT book. Some reviewer predicted early in Richard Brautigan’s career that he was creating a new genre, that one day we’d read novels, poems, short stories, and ‘brautigans.’ He was right, even if common parlance has yet to catch up. Enter the new mode of writing: ‘joe-youngs.’
John Dermot Woods, Big Other
Young’s microfictions function like emergency life rafts in that he gets this ostensibly small bit of material into your head and then pulls the cord and something huge unfolds.
Josh Maday, htmlgiant
Filled with pleasure and surprise, Easter Rabbit is a series of haunting whispers that resonate. With a voice of stunning curiosity, Joe Young’s microfiction is graceful and unique, a satisfying, tasteful indulgence.
Kim Chinquee, author of Pretty
Joe Young’s lovely little fictions present objects and parts, voices guiding voices, striking images in solid prose. A city of familiar scenes rises around the reader, who may be surprised to find how quickly they attach and draw her near. These are puzzles best devoured slowly.
Amelia Gray, author of Museum of the Weird
