A Man's Traveled Heart

In A Man's Traveled Heart, first-time author Micah Park Biffle presents forty-one imaginative short stories spanning time, space, and genre.

Many of the stories revolve around realistic, everyday struggles and feature vulnerable protagonists dealing with love and loss or traumatic pasts. Other stories delve into fantasy and explore topics such as enchanted libraries, lonely flowers, madness, and magic. Biffle writes from a number of perspectives, ranging from a child's, to a flower's, to a drunken man's, and often reveals astonishingly intricate details about his characters' inner lives.

Technically speaking, many of the works in A Man's Traveled Heart belong to the category of sudden fiction and are therefore quite short-under 750 words. Some are only a page long and focus on one meaningful moment. Others are woven together to make a larger thematic narrative or include characters from earlier stories. Tantalizingly, some of the stories include hidden messages that the author has deliberately planted for astute readers to unearth.

Biffle's stories don't promise happy endings. Instead, their conclusions will force you to think about the larger mysteries of the human condition and the world around us.