Burning All the Time
In twenty-three stories of flash fiction, Burning All the Time focuses on the landscape of Northeastern Oklahoma and the lives that populate it. Ranging from quiet realism to apocalypse and dystopia, from fiction to non-fiction, and from the gritty to the hopeful, Burning All the Time brings a corner of Oklahoma into full literary light.
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“Chris Murphy's Burning All the Time is full of beautiful, unexpected stories of Oklahoma and people who share a wry sense of compassion and longing, love and forgiveness. Murphy writes with sharp prose and a kind of intellectual depth so few writers can create. It's a charming, wonderfully crafted collection. I loved it."
—Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of The Removed
“What a knockout collection this is. Christopher Murphy knows the secret heart of eastern Oklahoma and renders it in ways compelling, mysterious, hilarious, and humane. A mashup of acutely observed realist detail and rich imaginings, these works of flash fiction combine to forge a narrative portrait that resonates long after the reading’s done.”
—Rilla Askew author of Strange Business and Harpsong
"Flash fiction is like narrative poetry roughed up some and, if roughed up right, made better. Well, there's poetry aplenty in Chris Murphy's collection, the narrative drive is strong, and the roughing up is very smartly done. Together, these fictions deliver a clear, many-faceted view of a tough, sweet corner of Oklahoma."
—Skip Hays, author of The Dixie Association and Dying Light
“In Burning All the Time, Chris Murphy illuminates the life within characters, the rough fusions between characters and more than anything a place, Northeastern Oklahoma, with the power to claim characters and work them into its weave. The result is fiction that becomes a place unto itself, with its own air, own distances, own loneliness, mystery and threat. Reading Murphy's stories, you'll find yourself inhabiting this singular place and caring for it mightily. In other words: you'll find that it's claimed you as well.”
—Ben Nickol, author of Sun River: Stories