Description: Praise for Elwin Cotman's books:"Elwin Cotman is one of the most original new voices you will encounter--he is a synthesizer of the domestic and the fantastic, of soaring myth and the grittiest realities, of lewd dialect and high lyricism. His stories are profound engagements with suffering of every stripe--they will also make you hoot with laughter. I was amazed by the force of Mr. Cotman's pinwheeling imagination." -- Karen Russell"Starbursts of talent . . . and a knack for biting and imaginative language." -- Lauren O'Neal, The Rumpus"Proves that magic and grit don't have to be mutually exclusive." -- Christine Stoddard, Quail Bell Magazine"Cotman's interests are wide-ranging: Punk rock intersects with D.C.'s Dominican community, African-American folktale intersects with Greek myth, Goth teen suburban angst in 1990s Ohio sits side by side with racist atrocity in the pre-Civil Rights South . . . Yeah, there's magic in some of these stories, but the real magic is in Cotman's words themselves--stark and deadpan one moment, lushly descriptive the next." -- Michael S. Begnal, author of Ancestor Worship"This is not always a comfortable book to read, but it is a magnificent one. The Jack Daniels Sessions EP: A Collection of Fantasies is comprised of short stories and vignettes that flow into one another like the Mississippi rushes over the Delta. Elwin Cotman is a writer, an activist, a performance artist and above all, an impeccable storyteller. . . . With raw and sometimes shocking authenticity, Cotman turns the ordinary into the sublime. There is no pretension here, just a million-watt light shining into corners of the human condition that many people would prefer forgotten, with a large helping of fantastic creatures, classical myth, and modern mayhem." -- Erzebet YellowBoy, Cabinet des Fes "Elwin Cotman's carefully wrought, gracefully accomplished, and lyrical narratives range in tone and style from picaresque and carnivalesque to elegiac, ironic, and melancholy. Yet, while tonally distinctive and aesthetically vivid, his stories are not so much driven by style or voice, as they are by love in the largest sense. For love does not exclude chaos nor avoid the vicissitudes of history and neither do Cotman's socially engaged, brilliantly crafted stories." -- Miranda Mellis

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