QUICK CHANGE
A reality TV show centers around hungry tigers let loose in a New Jersey shopping mall. A vaudeville-era quick-change artist comes to town, dazzling an ambitious journalist and inspiring murder. A professional mediator confronts the fact that she is bored to tears by her now-sober husband. A business sets up shop in Mississippi masquerading as an overseas call center specializing in poor customer service. A jealous professor slowly vanishes bit by bit along with the story itself, word by word. At turns tragic, comic, absurdist, and heartbreaking, the eleven astonishing stories in Quick Change (including two Pushcart Prize winners) reveal the full, startling range of ourselves to ourselves.
REVIEWS & PRAISE
Kardos is a master of the craft, one of the finest American short story writers of this quarter-century. These stories are a perfect blend of the traditional and the innovative, compelling action rooted in character but with detours along the way that surprise, delight, or horrify us . . . and often all three simultaneously. Just when you think you know what Kardos is up to, a lie is told, shots are fired, a tiger appears-and the story winds up in unexpected and fascinating new territory. A must-read for any lover of short fiction.
—Susan Perabo, author of The Fall of Lisa Bellow: A Novel
Quick Change is an apt title for a book of stories where the pace of revelation is rapid-fire. Epiphanies explode in succession. Lightning strikes again and again. Lives are changed forever. These electrifying stories alert us to our own human capacity for growth and regression, through dozens of literary judo flips after which we must reassess everything we thought we knew about the world. Through tales that range from a century in the past, at the peak of the vaudeville era, to an alternative future in which Reality TV has gone feral, Kardos evokes a culture that both reveres monsters and tries to kill them. And like the best writers of human nature, Kardos reveals those moments when his protagonists catch harrowing glimpses of the monster within.
─Phong Nguyen, author of Bronze Drum