Garnish Trouble by Robert Masterson

Robert Masterson‘s writing captures all facets of humanity–occasionally including the bits we’d rather not admit. His ability to set character and scene, teamed up with an old pit bull’s biting sense of humor and knowledge of the fight to survive, make him a guaranteed good read.

–Julia Gordon-Bramer (teacher, writer, editor) St. Louis, Missouri

Robert Masterson‘s Garnish Trouble needs no garnish. Each short short story is a novel on its own & a little gem. They are constructed like poems in prose. Marvelous. Read this book!
–Peter L. Douthit (Poetmaster, living legend  “Peter Rabbit”) Taos, New Mexico

Reading Garish Trouble is like filling your mouth at midnight with grain alcohol and then blowing it out over a lit matchstick, the dark world before your eyes going bright in a ball of flame. These are stories of dread and devastation, of cruelty and suffering, but they explode into scalding beauty, one after another, their agonies transformed by the artfulness of their narration.
–Seth Michelson (writer, teacher) Los Angeles, California

Masterson has given us 14 little shimmering, menacing diamonds, which collectively leaves us bedazzled, disturbed.
–Morris Eidelsberg (writer) Jerusalem, Israel

To read Robert Masterson’s Garnish Trouble is to be a fly on the kitchen cupboard, patio furniture, a hood of a car watching an amused but sincere participant as he knocks through the salt, shimmer and roil of life. Like Raymond Carver, Robert doesn’t explore relationships rather he is present in them: in telling his stories with precise language and short spate, the commonplace and minutia of cohabitation in barely functional relationships – with family, siblings, lovers, the lawn – have startling power.
–Rebecca Bush (writer, journalist, author of Bones Ripen and publisher / editor for Epictetus Press)
Poulsbo, Washington

ان لم يمتلك الادب اديبا لا يسطتيع ان يكتب بشكل جيد بعد مطالعة كتاب -روبرت ماسترسون-اعتقد انه كاتب مندمج كليا مع الادب لدرجة اصبح هو والادب واحدا
–Aline Khano (critic) Beirut, Lebanon

The imagination of R. Masterson dwells in that twilit zone of cold war material culture and spiritual confusion that erupts beneath the American psyche. The poisoning of innocence is here described with wry humor and persistent insight; here is Whitman and Tarkovsky playing nine-pins with Barbie and G.I. Joe; here is the reader searching everywhere for the exit, while not really wishing to find it, wondering, if indeed there is one.
–M. Djinn Moor Moore (critic and bon vivant) Ann Arbor, Michigan

In Garnish Trouble, each of Robert Masterson’s 14 meditations on exile, in the estrangement of the human being from himself and others, share a stylistic brilliance and vital sense of “quizzical amusement.” In an intellectual and emotional exhilaration rare among contemporary American authors, the inability of language to capture, or relieve, the beauty and fragility of one’s life, chills both the protagonist and readers who must respond directly to Masterson’s relentlessly imposing style. Both cool and dedicated, thought and feeling are restructured in a procedure that places the animate and the inanimate in a psychic spectacle stronger than itself. With care and precision, the author strips each story to reveal its convoluted, shining, seed, carefully placing it on the page. Readers are cast into an urgent practice of mindfulness, a skill at being present so we have a disordered devotion towards the “the real trouble,” the one “still out there waiting for us out at the end of a dirt road.” The permissiveness of its sentences becomes a frame for whatever is thrown up without exclusion. Masterson’s stories wrap themselves around you like warm foam.
–Andrew Levy (author, teacher) New York City, New York

Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) and is said to have called it his best work. In the 14 pieces of short, impressionistic scenes, Robert Masterson focuses on a moment, giving not only a sharp impression about a character, an idea or a setting. Garnish Trouble is also a more intimate and sympathetic study of a ultra-modern form with a beating heart.
–Julie O’Yang (writer and artist) Paris, France

Photo by Anna Patalano

Rating: *****  [5 of 5 Stars!]