A Collection for No One to Read, by Ben Shahon

Prose, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

"Shahon’s writing is like binge watching classic Simpsons episodes all night long. Like reading Marvel comic books with your crush under the stars. It's going home after a long day of work and blasting ‘00s pop punk through your speakers. It's avoiding the blue shell in Mario Kart and coming in first place. Which is to say, Ben Shahon’s A Collection for No One to Read is a high five straight to the heart, and it’s beautiful."

–Shawn Berman, Author of Mr. Funnyman and Editor of The Daily Drunk

"I love the tone and the rawness. Formality can shove it, I like the truth and I'm tired."

–wK blair, kith books

Thoughts of Taco Bell comfort a college student. A dad hates Disneyland. Corn. A child ruins her school photo. Late Capitalism grinds upon an office drone. The outside world scares a liberated prisoner. Total annihilation befalls a town, one house at a time. A magician receives his comeuppance. A Cyclops lodges a complaint. A beautiful night out that can’t be repeated.

Connected by an absurdist sense of humor and unnerving sense of existential dread, A Collection for No One to Read exhibits a sense of play, delivering one literary meme after another. Fed through a variety of forms such as list story, dramatic monologue, and one-sentence tongue twisters, A Collection for No One to Read asks questions about parents and children, the monotony of work, and the human condition.

A Collection for No One to Read is Ben Shahon’s first book.

Ben Shahon is a writer whose work has appeared in a number of journals, including Taco Bell Quarterly, The Daily Drunk, and others. He is the EIC of JAKE, holds an MFA in Fiction from Emerson College, and received BA’s in Philosophy and Creative Writing from Arizona State. Ben is deeply grateful for you continuing to read this nonsense, and asks that if you like it, to pass it on to someone else who might.