Dreams and Dull Realities

A Collection of Stories
by John Kearns

Dreams and Dull Realities is a unified collection of twelve stories playing variations on the theme of the collision between imagination and reality.

Dreams and Dull Realities uses a variety of techniques such as children’s speech, interior monologue, poetic flights, parodies of sportscasters, and local dialects to tell the stories of Philadelphians and New Yorkers ranging in age from childhood to adolescence to adulthood to old age.

Stories:

“Flight”
“Dreams and Dull Realities”
“Tulip Street”
“Finding the Day”
“It’s All Abandoned”
“IYouHeSheIt”
“Backstage”
“That You Do Unto Me”
“Athletics”
“Chances”
“A Tragic Story by Beatrice Mahon, O.P.”
“Happy Birthday, Jacky Mack”

The stories are arranged according to these age groups, with roughly three stories from each one. About half of the stories (5) are told from the female point of view and about half (7) from the male.

Dreams and Dull Realities was written over the course two decades in Philadelphia, The Bronx, Staten Island, and Manhattan. “Flight” won Second Prize for Fiction at the Trumbull Arts Festival in 1992 and was published in the festival journal. It was also chosen for the short fiction series at the NYC club, the Living Room. “Dreams and Dull Realities,” “Backstage,” “Athletics,” and “A Tragic Story by Beatrice Mahon, O.P.” have all been enjoyed by reading audiences on Capitol Hill and at venues around Manhattan.

Buy Dreams and Dull Realities.

The World

A Novel
By John Kearns

“Why didn’t they know? … He could see the darkness of their souls, the void that drove them to huddle together at all times … He saw the souls, too, of all the other swim clubs that he had joined or visited over the years, clubs filled with equal measures of hypocrisy, deceit, and meanness, each one seeming to its members, as primitive societies did to theirs, to be all that there is, the whole world.”

Saturated with what he has learned of Classics and history, a 16-year-old boy reflects upon the flow of recent events in his own history: his discovering his Irish heritage, his loss of a job, his receiving an Artistic vocation, his traumatic experiences of unrequited love. These events become psychic cataclysms that destroy his traditional worldview and force him to create a new one. They also teach him what it means to become an Artist and a man.

Exploiting imagery ranging from Greek mythology to video games and employing conventional and experimental techniques, The World is a passionate, multi-layered, poetic depiction of an artistic soul’s maturation. Twenty years in the writing, The World is a work that should be read again and again.

Purchase The World for yourself!

For more information on John Kearns’s writing, visit KearnsCafe.com.