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Hoopty Time Machines
HOOPTY TIME MACHINES: fairy tales for grown ups is a collection of forty-five fantastical stories filled with peculiar journeys and wild awakenings, with fairytale heroines, introspective superheroes, and a whole menagerie of monsters—each one deeply human, and a little bit heartbreaking.
One of the "most anticipated small press books of 2016" (John Madera, Big Other).
REVIEWS:
"Funny and devastating." – Jennifer Messner, Books, Personally
"The literary equivalent of a perfect mix tape... There are doorstop novels out there that fail to achieve the emotional impact DeWan can generate with a single honest, well-crafted sentence." – Laura Garrison, Jersey Devil Press
"Imaginative and terrifying.... Be warned, reader, there is danger here, and you will certainly welcome it." – The Wild Hunt
ADVANCE PRAISE:
"There are hints of Barthelme, Vonnegut, and Calvino to be found here, but make no mistake: DeWan is something gloriously new." – Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters
"Like Barry Yourgrau went on tour with sad, lyrical stand-up routines—funny, sharp, playful zingers of stories that reach right out to grab a reader." – Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
"Hoopty Time Machines is much like a bag of M&M's, in that it's nearly impossible, once you've opened it, not to consume it down to the last morsel, and fast. It is less like a bag of M&M's in that you never know what you'll find beneath the candy coating: a peanut or an amphetamine, a rosary bead or a thumbtack." – Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Illumination
"Christopher DeWan's Hoopty Time Machines is that rare story collection that is both a total blast to read and a complete philosophical package. These abrupt, funny, vigorous stories—involving urban legends, minotaurs, little mermaids, chupacabras, and changelings—contain in their brevity vast depth and import. These are stories to read, reread, and perennially enjoy." – Sharma Shields, author of The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac
"An absolute delight from the first page to the last: it's like that scene in Singin' in the Rain, only with ideas instead of puddles." – Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
"Sometimes funny, often tragic, usually bizarre, and always interesting." – Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty
One of the "most anticipated small press books of 2016" (John Madera, Big Other).
REVIEWS:
"Funny and devastating." – Jennifer Messner, Books, Personally
"The literary equivalent of a perfect mix tape... There are doorstop novels out there that fail to achieve the emotional impact DeWan can generate with a single honest, well-crafted sentence." – Laura Garrison, Jersey Devil Press
"Imaginative and terrifying.... Be warned, reader, there is danger here, and you will certainly welcome it." – The Wild Hunt
ADVANCE PRAISE:
"There are hints of Barthelme, Vonnegut, and Calvino to be found here, but make no mistake: DeWan is something gloriously new." – Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters
"Like Barry Yourgrau went on tour with sad, lyrical stand-up routines—funny, sharp, playful zingers of stories that reach right out to grab a reader." – Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
"Hoopty Time Machines is much like a bag of M&M's, in that it's nearly impossible, once you've opened it, not to consume it down to the last morsel, and fast. It is less like a bag of M&M's in that you never know what you'll find beneath the candy coating: a peanut or an amphetamine, a rosary bead or a thumbtack." – Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Illumination
"Christopher DeWan's Hoopty Time Machines is that rare story collection that is both a total blast to read and a complete philosophical package. These abrupt, funny, vigorous stories—involving urban legends, minotaurs, little mermaids, chupacabras, and changelings—contain in their brevity vast depth and import. These are stories to read, reread, and perennially enjoy." – Sharma Shields, author of The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac
"An absolute delight from the first page to the last: it's like that scene in Singin' in the Rain, only with ideas instead of puddles." – Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
"Sometimes funny, often tragic, usually bizarre, and always interesting." – Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty
133 pages, Paperback
Published September 22, 2016
2 people are currently reading
107 people want to read
About the author
Christopher DeWan
9 books26 followersChristopher DeWan is a writer and teacher living in New York. Learn more at http://christopherdewan.com.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
April 12, 2016
This is totally my kind of book.
September 16, 2016
Well, this is an absolutely gorgeous book. Inside and out. Beautifully designed with a stunning cover and layout. But read this. Read these stories. They are gaspingly original and daring. My personal favorites were the very tiny ones you could read in a breath: "The Dinner Party" ("Anxiety was the first guest to arrive, as usual."), "The Sacred Book of Salmon" ("...we are told to love other salmon as we would have other salmon love us."), "Indestructible"...Oh, "Notes and Origin Myths" at the end is just freaking delightful. There's a sort of joyous weirdness to DeWan's world view. It makes me glad to know his writing. Read this book. You'll be glad too.
October 5, 2016
This is a book about monsters, the ones underneath the house and the ones inside it; this is a book about love, the kind you feel and the kind you wish you felt; this is a book about life, the one you imagined you'd be living, and the one that's actually yours.
This is a book about longing, about traversing the space between real life and fairy tales, and about real characters trading in their banalities for myth. But it's just as much about mythical characters, the Godzillas and Supermans and Rapunzels of the world, deciding to dip their toes into the waters of "real life," to see if they might have a go at being human. Which of course begs the question: What IS being human?
That is the question that fuels this beautiful debut collection. HOOPTY TIME MACHINES is not your average short story collection, and therein lies its charm: this is a weird and whirling book, with some stories that are one-sentence long and some that bloom and twist over many pages. You'll find something lovely in every story, a thought or image or idea that will stay with you. Hell—you could spend a whole afternoon staring at the cover alone, unearthing wondrous new secrets hidden amidst the wheels and cogs.
The cover image is a great metaphor for the book itself: Christopher does a marvelous job of digging up various existential oddities and then narrowing his lens so that we come to see the world as he does: broken, baffling, and beautiful.
If you want to read stories that will enliven your senses, challenge your mind, and stir your soul, hop in your HOOPTY TIME MACHINE and read this book. But buyer beware: these stories just might break your heart. They wouldn't be much of a time machine if they didn't.
This is a book about longing, about traversing the space between real life and fairy tales, and about real characters trading in their banalities for myth. But it's just as much about mythical characters, the Godzillas and Supermans and Rapunzels of the world, deciding to dip their toes into the waters of "real life," to see if they might have a go at being human. Which of course begs the question: What IS being human?
That is the question that fuels this beautiful debut collection. HOOPTY TIME MACHINES is not your average short story collection, and therein lies its charm: this is a weird and whirling book, with some stories that are one-sentence long and some that bloom and twist over many pages. You'll find something lovely in every story, a thought or image or idea that will stay with you. Hell—you could spend a whole afternoon staring at the cover alone, unearthing wondrous new secrets hidden amidst the wheels and cogs.
The cover image is a great metaphor for the book itself: Christopher does a marvelous job of digging up various existential oddities and then narrowing his lens so that we come to see the world as he does: broken, baffling, and beautiful.
If you want to read stories that will enliven your senses, challenge your mind, and stir your soul, hop in your HOOPTY TIME MACHINE and read this book. But buyer beware: these stories just might break your heart. They wouldn't be much of a time machine if they didn't.
October 20, 2017
I'm loving the shit out of Hoopty Time Machines. The pieces are so sad, funny, scary and clever the just need to be read aloud to your friend while sitting on the couch.
June 19, 2016
I loved this book. I found it compelling from the first page and although I stopped for a few hours of sleep and to get the kids to school, I basically couldn't/wouldn't put it down.
DeWan captures the uncanny, the modern, and the mythological in these lovely short pieces. Reading this stirred many emotions within me: yearning, humility, sadness, and a deep aesthetic pleasure. I have consistently been impressed with his short stories as they have been published singly in magazines. This collection is no different.
Each story creates a world, often in an instant, mostly influenced by fairy tales or mythology but thoroughly modern in sensibility if not always in content. There are no unambiguously happy endings here, but there is rich humanity and deep yearning for lives lived fully. DeWan captures both the hope and despair of humanity in rich, specific language. These stories tackle how Superman reacts to collateral damage, missing the signs of Bigfoot all around, several visits with Theseus into the labyrinth, and what happens after happily ever after.
None of the stories are long. The shortest is a single, perfect sentence, the longest no more than 10 pages. DeWan touches on an idea or an image, gives it enough flesh to carry weight-using artfully constructed sentences with poetic precision of image and movement through plot, and then leaves a twist, ambiguity, or change of perspective that jostles the reader out of any complacency that might have appeared. Reading this collection was not a passive experience. DeWan took me on emotional and imaginative journeys and forced me to stay awake the whole way through.
These stories both stand apart and fit together. Picking a favourite is impossible; each one is rich in its own way, though several of them struck me on first reading as perfect encapsulations of a moment, a thought, a feeling, or a truth. This is a collection I will dip into and reread.
DeWan captures the uncanny, the modern, and the mythological in these lovely short pieces. Reading this stirred many emotions within me: yearning, humility, sadness, and a deep aesthetic pleasure. I have consistently been impressed with his short stories as they have been published singly in magazines. This collection is no different.
Each story creates a world, often in an instant, mostly influenced by fairy tales or mythology but thoroughly modern in sensibility if not always in content. There are no unambiguously happy endings here, but there is rich humanity and deep yearning for lives lived fully. DeWan captures both the hope and despair of humanity in rich, specific language. These stories tackle how Superman reacts to collateral damage, missing the signs of Bigfoot all around, several visits with Theseus into the labyrinth, and what happens after happily ever after.
None of the stories are long. The shortest is a single, perfect sentence, the longest no more than 10 pages. DeWan touches on an idea or an image, gives it enough flesh to carry weight-using artfully constructed sentences with poetic precision of image and movement through plot, and then leaves a twist, ambiguity, or change of perspective that jostles the reader out of any complacency that might have appeared. Reading this collection was not a passive experience. DeWan took me on emotional and imaginative journeys and forced me to stay awake the whole way through.
These stories both stand apart and fit together. Picking a favourite is impossible; each one is rich in its own way, though several of them struck me on first reading as perfect encapsulations of a moment, a thought, a feeling, or a truth. This is a collection I will dip into and reread.
August 14, 2016
One of my favorite things about this book is that at the end, the author explains the ideas behind the stories in “Notes and Origin Myths”. I wish I would have realized this while reading it because I think it really adds a lot to understand the context of the individual stories.
My favorite quote is in “Rapunzel’s Tangles”: "… she loved him, but maybe because what we mean by ‘love’ is sometimes a nice, portable word to describe the shorthand, the easy easiness that we’re lucky to experience with a few strangers over a lifetime. Love: a lack of the typical discomfort. Love: what trickles in through the otherwise impermeable solipsism.”
This is an out-of-genre reading choice for me. Generally I don’t enjoy short story anthologies, but this took me back to the days in school where you would have philosophical arguments over the meaning of things. While a short book, each story is so thought provoking that I found myself unable to read more than a couple in a given day. I needed the time to process the meaning of each one. I found them useful for focused meditation.
In the order presented in the book, my favorite stories are: “The Wallpaper”, “Goldilocks and the Three Boys”, “Monster”, “Social Media”, “Fortress of Solitude”, “Zeno’s Archers”, “The Tired End of the Party”, “The Little Mermaid”, “The Signal”, and “Outbreak”.
In the Afterword, the author explains the unifying factors of the stories and his vision behind them. I think he achieved his goal through his writing to convey the longing of escape. With this book I did.
Overall Recommendation: Read it. It’s dense and worth every page.
My favorite quote is in “Rapunzel’s Tangles”: "… she loved him, but maybe because what we mean by ‘love’ is sometimes a nice, portable word to describe the shorthand, the easy easiness that we’re lucky to experience with a few strangers over a lifetime. Love: a lack of the typical discomfort. Love: what trickles in through the otherwise impermeable solipsism.”
This is an out-of-genre reading choice for me. Generally I don’t enjoy short story anthologies, but this took me back to the days in school where you would have philosophical arguments over the meaning of things. While a short book, each story is so thought provoking that I found myself unable to read more than a couple in a given day. I needed the time to process the meaning of each one. I found them useful for focused meditation.
In the order presented in the book, my favorite stories are: “The Wallpaper”, “Goldilocks and the Three Boys”, “Monster”, “Social Media”, “Fortress of Solitude”, “Zeno’s Archers”, “The Tired End of the Party”, “The Little Mermaid”, “The Signal”, and “Outbreak”.
In the Afterword, the author explains the unifying factors of the stories and his vision behind them. I think he achieved his goal through his writing to convey the longing of escape. With this book I did.
Overall Recommendation: Read it. It’s dense and worth every page.
May 26, 2017
Christopher DeWan’s
Hoopty Time Machines
(Atticus Books) is a fabulous collection of fabulist miniatures, where you’ll find monsters, in a labyrinth, in a well, and innumerable creatures in and out of holes, drains, pipes, wells; where you’ll find an atheist bearing stigmata, an obsessive wallpaper-er, a boy changeling, trolls, conscious salmon, an un-scary bogeyman, a haiku-reading Godzilla, Poseidon’s cuckold, Frankenstein’s cuckquean; and defamiliarized myths and legends sending up Goldilocks, Ulysses, Shiva, Theseus, Superman, and others. These “fairy tales for grown-ups” offer satirical takes on post-industrial society, clever plays on social media and the blogosphere, bringing to the surface its resulting angst, anonymity, and loneliness. These stories are among my favorites: “Intrusion,” “The Bundle,” “Blog of the Last Man on Earth,” “The Fibonacci Forest,” “The Garden,” and “Rapunzel’s Tangles.”
October 7, 2016
These tiny stories are fun to read aloud, easy to read again and again, and the more you do, the more they worm into your brain where they wait, and dream and grow into something much larger. It takes a true craftsman to pare down stories to their (to quote the author) atomic propositions, and that's what you'll find here.
September 16, 2016
This brilliant book of short fiction is packed with fun, adventure, insights, and unexpected reimaginings of what the short story can and should be. On top of all that, it will make you laugh out loud!
March 21, 2019
Late to this party but I enjoyed it. Personal favorites: "Social Media," "The Trolls" and "Godzilla Reading Haiku." I look forward to Christopher DeWan's next book.
October 4, 2016
If Rod Serling and W. Somerset Maugham had a baby, this would be it.
Fun, thoughtful, and entertaining.
Fun, thoughtful, and entertaining.
September 28, 2016
I had this habit as a kid, where if I tasted something delightful and new, I'd spit it into my palm, half-chewed, for a close examination, admiring it's half-masticated spittle-flecked self, thinking a closer look at its guts might unlock something mystical, before popping it back mouthward and polishing it off. Or maybe I was just a disgusting child, which is more likely.
While I didn't actually put Hoopty Time Machines into my mouth (yet), I couldn't help but perform the reader's equivalent of that process. Every page houses a shiny little bauble of perfection.
My advice to new readers: don't chew too fast. Spit it out sometimes and take a good look.
While I didn't actually put Hoopty Time Machines into my mouth (yet), I couldn't help but perform the reader's equivalent of that process. Every page houses a shiny little bauble of perfection.
My advice to new readers: don't chew too fast. Spit it out sometimes and take a good look.
August 16, 2017
Short, clever, funny, often bittersweet stories. I pretty much devoured them. They have alternative takes on traditional fairytales and myths, as well as poignant stories that allude to problems in our society.
One of the ones that hit me the hardest and gave me a moment of introspection:
The Wallpaper:
"She liked the wallpaper so much that she papered the outside of her house with it, then the windows of her house, her shed, her lawn, the mailbox, the street lamp, the sidewalk, her car, the windshield of the car, and then the lenses of her glasses - until she'd ensured that no matter where her eyes fell, they would land on the recurring pattern - unchanging, assuring- and she would never have to look at anything disagreeable again until the day she died, and she lined the inside of her coffin with it, too, so she could feel this way forever."
One of the ones that hit me the hardest and gave me a moment of introspection:
The Wallpaper:
"She liked the wallpaper so much that she papered the outside of her house with it, then the windows of her house, her shed, her lawn, the mailbox, the street lamp, the sidewalk, her car, the windshield of the car, and then the lenses of her glasses - until she'd ensured that no matter where her eyes fell, they would land on the recurring pattern - unchanging, assuring- and she would never have to look at anything disagreeable again until the day she died, and she lined the inside of her coffin with it, too, so she could feel this way forever."
July 22, 2017
Ooh I loved this and I'm not normally into short stories. But I was hooked from my first peek inside. Funny but poignant, clever and insightful. I'll definitely be reading more by this author.
July 27, 2019
THIS IS AMAZING.
But it's impossible to find -- I'm told the publisher went belly up soon after its publication.
Finger-length sticky tapes of fiction - the shortest a sentence, the longest perhaps a thousand words. Portraits, perversions of fairy tales, unlikely sources of hope, open mysteries.
Very short -- impossible to summarize. Find it. Read it.
June 15, 2023
Reviewed by Jordan Moslowski on www.rowanglassworks.org.
Every child hears “Once upon a time” and immediately knows that “happily ever after” is on its way. Snow White is woken up with Prince Charming’s kiss. Ariel gets her legs and her man. Cinderella is reunited with her precious glass slipper and her true love. But what happens when you wander off into your own once upon a time, only to find that Cinderella’s other shoe has dropped on your head? Suddenly you’re sitting on the commuter train, heading into another Monday of sucking down crappy coffee in that tiny office it took you five years of making copies and running office lunch orders to get promoted to.
Now you’re thinking happily ever after might just be for fairy tales after all.
Welcome to the world of Christopher DeWan’s Hoopty Time Machines, a collection of fairy tales for adults that transports you far, far away from “happily ever after” and more towards “moderately satisfying reality.” In forty-five short stories, DeWan takes the hopefulness of a child’s fairy tale and throws it into the adult world, where things don’t always go perfectly wrong -- they just go wrong.
Throughout this collection, DeWan captures how overwhelmed we can feel when we finally stop moving-moving-moving for a few seconds, and he makes us ache over the composition of small moments in our lives that never came to be. In “Sacramento,” he is able, in just one sentence, to break our hearts over all that we never even knew: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into some other one.” His stories examine that moment of escape where readers can imagine all the possibilities of how they want life to be, before they have to face how it actually is.
The real twist of this collection is that in some cases, these characters do reach a point where they can look back and settle into the realization that they are happy, just without taking the exact route they had originally mapped out. DeWan steps away from what children initially believe will make them happy, and instead pulls a more realistic happy ending under the microscope for a closer look.
While children dream of growing up, grown-ups dream to escape it. When the bills start piling up and you’re spending Friday night buried in a stack of paperwork, your idea of happy looks less like true love’s kiss and more like accidentally-on-purpose hitting your snooze button a few more times. Hoopty Time Machines gathers all of these little things and turns them into one big thing -- the mediocre but satisfying grind of reality. Whether it be a day alone, finally getting the baby to fall asleep, throwing out those dusty stacks of magazines, or having the guts to ditch your office job to chase the American Dream, the ending can still be happy, even if it isn’t as grand as you’d imagined as a kid.
These stories show us one of the most valuable lessons when it comes to happy endings: they are rarely free. Even when we make it to our happy endings, it is not because the universe decided to just let everything fall into place. While the characters in Disney movies get to take a nap while they wait for life to work itself out, reality doesn’t work that way. In his short story “Indestructible,” DeWan makes miracles happen when an eight year-old defeats her battle with cancer -- only then, though, does her real-world battle with doctor’s bills begin. He recognizes the reality that you need to fight for any happy ending you get, whether it’s delivery is how you imagined it or not.
Hoopty Time Machines dispels the idea that all happily ever afters are the same, while perfectly amplifying the messiness of life that may not always drive you straight off into the sunset, but will still take you somewhere worthwhile.
Every child hears “Once upon a time” and immediately knows that “happily ever after” is on its way. Snow White is woken up with Prince Charming’s kiss. Ariel gets her legs and her man. Cinderella is reunited with her precious glass slipper and her true love. But what happens when you wander off into your own once upon a time, only to find that Cinderella’s other shoe has dropped on your head? Suddenly you’re sitting on the commuter train, heading into another Monday of sucking down crappy coffee in that tiny office it took you five years of making copies and running office lunch orders to get promoted to.
Now you’re thinking happily ever after might just be for fairy tales after all.
Welcome to the world of Christopher DeWan’s Hoopty Time Machines, a collection of fairy tales for adults that transports you far, far away from “happily ever after” and more towards “moderately satisfying reality.” In forty-five short stories, DeWan takes the hopefulness of a child’s fairy tale and throws it into the adult world, where things don’t always go perfectly wrong -- they just go wrong.
Throughout this collection, DeWan captures how overwhelmed we can feel when we finally stop moving-moving-moving for a few seconds, and he makes us ache over the composition of small moments in our lives that never came to be. In “Sacramento,” he is able, in just one sentence, to break our hearts over all that we never even knew: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into some other one.” His stories examine that moment of escape where readers can imagine all the possibilities of how they want life to be, before they have to face how it actually is.
The real twist of this collection is that in some cases, these characters do reach a point where they can look back and settle into the realization that they are happy, just without taking the exact route they had originally mapped out. DeWan steps away from what children initially believe will make them happy, and instead pulls a more realistic happy ending under the microscope for a closer look.
While children dream of growing up, grown-ups dream to escape it. When the bills start piling up and you’re spending Friday night buried in a stack of paperwork, your idea of happy looks less like true love’s kiss and more like accidentally-on-purpose hitting your snooze button a few more times. Hoopty Time Machines gathers all of these little things and turns them into one big thing -- the mediocre but satisfying grind of reality. Whether it be a day alone, finally getting the baby to fall asleep, throwing out those dusty stacks of magazines, or having the guts to ditch your office job to chase the American Dream, the ending can still be happy, even if it isn’t as grand as you’d imagined as a kid.
These stories show us one of the most valuable lessons when it comes to happy endings: they are rarely free. Even when we make it to our happy endings, it is not because the universe decided to just let everything fall into place. While the characters in Disney movies get to take a nap while they wait for life to work itself out, reality doesn’t work that way. In his short story “Indestructible,” DeWan makes miracles happen when an eight year-old defeats her battle with cancer -- only then, though, does her real-world battle with doctor’s bills begin. He recognizes the reality that you need to fight for any happy ending you get, whether it’s delivery is how you imagined it or not.
Hoopty Time Machines dispels the idea that all happily ever afters are the same, while perfectly amplifying the messiness of life that may not always drive you straight off into the sunset, but will still take you somewhere worthwhile.
October 12, 2016
I read HOOPTY TIME MACHINES straight through, in two sittings, one half each time. This was a mistake. These stories are to be savored, I think, not read back-to-back-to-back-to-back. You need to read a handful at a time, digest them, force yourself to wait until the next evening before going back for more, like those fancy after-dinner mints. HOOPTY TIME MACHINES is Aesop's Fables for mathematicians and nihilists, beauty that can make you sick.
December 23, 2017
A dark, angsty twist on some classic fairy tales? Sign me up. I went to hear the author when this book came out last year and he was amazing. The stories are so short he must have gone through half a dozen in an hour but the way he stripped them down, leaving just the moral (or anti-moral) was wonderful.
November 6, 2016
This collection is surprising and satisfying at every turn. As a bonus, it made me have really cool dreams.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews