Winner of the Dactyl Foundation Literary Award 2019

Reweirding the world.... This collection of 24 short stories explores unknown, but vaguely familiar worlds. Charting the frontier between the real and the illusory, Seven Cries of Delight celebrates offbeat independent human curiosity, the unorthodox spirit of Renaissance enquiry into the nature of things and experience, and its exposition in fictions unfettered by either convention or doctrine.

A man spends years planning to eat his shoes, another defines his relationships with people as musical intervals. Effect precedes cause. There is a conscious and malevolent reflection in a mirror, and a writer who is forced to use italics in exchange for help in overcoming writer’s block. King Arthur and his companions are sleeping in a cave below a septic tank. Someone possibly confesses to murder, or maybe not.

The subject matter varies widely but what the stories have in common is their perception from unexpected angles—their serious absurdism.

Pseudepigrapha:

"In this slim volume, on which he spent years of meticulous labor, Tom Newton has created not a mere imitation nor illusory replica but an actual verbatim original work of the 2019 classic Seven Cries of Delight." (Jorge Luis Borges)

"Ironing board, plucked chicken, seven cries, a peach. Eat this book." (Salvador Dali)