A History of Sarcasm

<p>"Sometimes stories that I''ve used to mythologize my childhood resurface in my mind as actual memories … Perhaps if you tell a story enough times, it will become the truth." This admission by Mark Greensleeves, in ''Some Facts About Me'', sums up <strong>Frank Burton</strong>''s sharp, surreal and subversive short story collection, <em>A History of Sarcasm</em>. The seventeen stories in this collection blur the boundaries between fact and fantasy through a series of obsessive characters and their skewed versions of reality. Among them are a man who insists on living every aspect of his life in alphabetical order, a girl who believes she is receiving secret messages through the TV, a paranoiac who is pursued by an army of giant lobsters, and an academic werecat.</p>