The Jack Daniels Sessions EP

A Washington D.C. punk club gets a visit from very ancient--and dangerous--guests. The mythic and the mundane collide at a general store in the segregated South. A young boy becomes apprentice to the Angel of Death. In Elwin Cotman's Carl Brandon Award-nominated debut collection, the humorous mixes with the historical and the epic mixes with the deeply personal. Cotman combines the language of high fantasy, urban fantasy, black folklore, teen angst, punk rock and horror to create American fairy tales with landscapes all their own.

Reviews

"The Jack Daniels Sessions EP is revolutionary, riveting and remarkable. Elwin Cotman's prose grabs you from word one, and you don't want it to let you go. This book marks the unveiling of a major new voice in science fiction and fantasy."
--Charles R. Saunders, author of Imaro

"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, author of Swamplandia!

"In The Jack Daniels Sessions, folktales and modern landscapes collide, exploding and reforming in the form of an intriguing and intelligent collection. Cotman seizes the stories of tired tradition and galvanizes them, setting them to dance for us in wonderful, new interpretations."
--Cat Rambo, author of The Surgeon's Tale

"Elwin Cotman has written a book for our times--edgy and transcendent, surreal and bizarrely sweet. You won't put this down after you've picked it up, and you won't be the same once you've finished it. This is a new voice to listen to closely. A writer with strange and exciting gifts."
--Laura Kasischke, author of The Life Before Her Eyes

"Cotman has an amazing voice, and his fabulist descriptions are so vividly communicated, they almost lift from the page and become three-dimensional beings that are impossible images to forget."
--Savannah Schroll Guz, author of American Soma

"Mr. 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, and magic is going on. 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 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."
--Cabinet de Fées