Whispering Gallery
Purchase BookWhispering Gallery is a collection of tales focused on assorted oddballs and orphans, dropouts and outcasts. Queer, cyborg, inspissated, iffy, solipsistic, or deformed, the book’s unorthodox characters catch themselves at moments where they feel some elation that escapes them, as if with a dawning awareness of how the earth pivots beneath their feet through the celestial spheres. We enter a trippy, elliptical warp-zone where the reader overhears whispers at various removes from our commonplace reality. Yet, such discordant notes are often the gossip of neighboring lives or the ricocheting echoes of one’s own pulse and breath. The pieces represent a panoply of refracted voices: “the world,” as George Eliot once wrote, “apparently being a huge whispering gallery.” The book offers a headlong dive into the subconscious, describing the phantasms lurking at the edges so powerfully that you feel a circle drawn around you. Whispering Gallery contains a wide variety of experimental prose pieces redounding with dark humor and offbeat styles—like cracking open an old jar, you never know what memories or dreams will waft up and overtake you.
Creepy basements. Fortune teller tents. Spiders. Existential philosophy. Rodents. Ding Dongs. Cordeiro’s rich and provocative language seduces us, pulls us in. You peer into the shadows to see what veiny threads hang from the ceiling to find the webby light of an eye looking right back at you. These stories embody the thing I admire most: ecstatic imagination.
--Nicole Walker, author of Sustainability: A Love Story and Egg
Linguistically lush, gleefully grody, and obsessively ontological, Cordeiro’s stories, soliloquies, and prose poems give voice to an eerie and enigmatic reality.
--Michael Jeffrey Lee, author of Something in My Eye and My Worst Ideas
Publication date: Oct. 31, 2024
ISBN: 978-1962004022
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Will Cordeiro has work published or forthcoming in 32 Poems, AGNI, Bennington Review, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, and The Threepenny Review. Will won the Able Muse Book Award for Trap Street (Able Muse, 2021). Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). Will’s plays have been performed in many venues off-off-Broadway and around the United States, including most recently a collaboration on a libretto for a three-act opera, Pop Goes the Ferret! produced at the ARTx Festival in Flagstaff, Arizona. After receiving an MFA and Ph.D. from Cornell University, Will taught in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University for nearly a decade. Currently, Will is coeditor of Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.
