A World Beyond Cardboard

A gang of beached octopuses, a flat stripped bare, a dead husband appearing in condensation, a sip of Soju and a secret, an egg boiling in a pan…

A World Beyond Cardboard collects twelve of Jonathan Cardew’s award-winning micro stories, each investigating a character or characters at crisis points, in worlds at once familiar and in the end very strange.

With his minimal, rhythmical prose style, Cardew cracks open narratives at crucial moments, diving into the fissures and frustrations of ordinary life, exposing the unknown and the unseen.

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Praise for A World Beyond Cardboard

These stories brim with invention and play, with a sly and unprepossessing humor. This is a writer who can be wistful, light, lustful and liminal all within the same story. A wondrous, expansive voice in the lit world

–Robert Vaughan, author of Askew

Jonathan Cardew’s crisp and humane stories shine by making space: the unhanging of a picture, an impression left on glass. A World Beyond Cardboard is as vulnerable as it is charming

–Jennifer Howard, editor-in-chief of Passages North

Jonathan Cardew writes clipped, lean sentences of the kind that would have left Gordon Lish out of a job. As well as the hints of menace, there is absurdity here, and on every page something unexpected startles – a flourish, or a narrative leap. Lovers interact uneasily, as if something is about to erupt. Children grapple with the confusion of odd, unsettling families. Cardew’s playfulness and precision shines through. This is a remarkable collection – it grabs the attention and only gets better with each re-reading.

–Michael Loveday, author of Unlocking the Novella-In-Flash: From Blank Page to Finished Manuscript

About the Author

Jonathan Cardew is the author of A World Beyond Cardboard (ELJ Editions, 2022). He hails from the Steel City but lives in the Cream City. He is not sure how this happened. A flash fiction fanatic, his stories can be found in numerous magazines and journals, including Cincinnati Review, No Contact Magazine, wigleaf, cream city review, Cleaver, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. His short-short stories have been honored in various prizes and anthologies, including the Fractured Literary Vol I Prize (winner), Best Microfiction 2021 (winner), the SmokeLong Prize for Flash Fiction (finalist), the Passages North Neutrino Prize (finalist), Bath Flash Fiction Award (shortlisted and longlisted), Best Small Fictions (finalist), Lunate Flash Fiction Award (finalist), and the Reflex Fiction Prize (longlisted). The former fiction editor for Connotation Press, he currently serves as blog editor and online workshop leader for Bending Genres. For more information and links to his published work, check out his website.

A World Beyond Cardboard

Praise for A World Beyond Cardboard

About the Author

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