Cemetery management. A side gig breathing fire. Tattooing teeth for a living. Wrangling camera-ready squirrels for the movies. These are stories about the jobs people never wanted, always wanted, or still can't land-the jobs they do for lack of a better option, or to support family honor and free honey buns. They are stories about beloved pets, left-behind lovers, family members who won't negotiate, and treacherous bank balances. So enter the thrift store, the side show, the senior center, the zoo, for a cup of coffee or pint of beer, and a few work opportunities you never expected. PRAISE FOR TERESA MILBRODT:
Zeke Jarvis on "Work Opportunities" - Milbrodt's work is the best of not just both worlds, but of three worlds. It genuinely entertains, fascinating the reader with its feats of imagination, it demonstrates care and craftsmanship that is genuinely admirable, and it trains the reader to be a more thoughtful, curious person.
Kate Harlin on "Work Opportunities" - Teresa Milbrodt's new fiction collection asks what it means when our bodies, with all of their specific quirks, frailties, and imperfections become the focal point of our livelihoods, our relationships, our lives, and finds answers alternately joyful and devastating...it is when the characters' senses of themselves and of their bodies come into conflict that the stories eke out the most uncomfortable truths. ... In each story, Milbrodt crafts, in just few short pages, a world almost indistinguishable from our own, but where the characters, who would often live at the margins of the world we recognize, comfortably occupy the center.
Rick Claypool on "Work Opportunities" - Simultaneously dreamlike and down-to-earth, Milbrodt's tales explore surreal premises - the love life of a professional impersonator of great aunts or the thrill of secretly training large cats to pull a sled - unified by the way they comment on the absurd and exasperating condition of the contemporary worker's life. ... Milbrodt is a Surrealist Studs Terkel exploring the grimy and unglamorous aspects of her unlikely characters' everyday lives, delivered in droll, deadpan prose.
Anthony Doerr on "Bearded Women: Stories" - Teresa Milbrodt writes funny, inventive, strange, and engaging fiction. In each of her stories lies plain evidence of meticulousness; well-rendered gestures, astonishingly unique characters, lovely and specific detailing of scene.
Michael Martone on "Larissa Takes Flight: Stories" -Donald Barthelme often said he wanted to be on the leading edge of the junk phenomenon. The deadpanned nuggets found in Teresa Milbrodt's collection of guileless-o-grams, Larissa's Guide to Trying to Be a Good Person in the World, mops up after the delightful detritus of the great Don B. Understated to the point of having the bends, these flatly flat fictions juice the form, inject the quotidian with steroids used off-label to produce the ripped and sculpted musculature of raw awe.
Lex Williford on "Larissa Takes Flight: Stories" -Teresa Milbrodt's new collection of flash fiction...makes the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, and reading her hilarious Kafkaesque internal monologues is a bit like eating grilled cauliflower and broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables. Nobody out there writes like Teresa Milbrodt, nobody. A one-of-a-kind collection.
Asimov's on "Bearded Women: Stories" -"ChiZine Publications delivers a phenomenal collection with Teresa Milbrodt's Bearded Women... Milbrodt's writing is akin to that of Carol Emshwiller or Karen Russell (Swamplandia!). The most outré beings and events are presented with matter-of-fact mimetic clarity and emotional empathy."
