Getting to One: Flash Fictions by Eileen R. Tabios and Art by harry k stammer

Publisher: Sandy Press (Santa Barbara, CA / Old Hill, Australia)
Release Date: Fall 2023
ISBN: 978-1-7368160-7-3
Price: $15.00
Distributors: Sandy Press, Amazon, Ebay, among others

ADVANCE WORDS
Getting to One is a quirky collection of vignettes that examine solitude, and lace it with wry humour, left turns, philosophy, colonialism, war, and strong spirits. These tales are linked through a bar where patrons must drink alone. Art echoes the loneliness and unexpected connections in the fictions. Killing Eve meets Casablanca in this entertaining and contemplative collection where a kiss could be a kiss or a poisonous jelly fish or a blood soaked mirror or the strongest alcohol in the world.
—Amanda Earl, author of Beast Body Epic and The Vispo Bible and editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry

In Getting To One, Eileen R. Tabios delivers the reader into the lives of irregular regulars who each, for their own colourful variant of happenstance, end up at One, a bar where patrons must drink alone. These brief glimpses into One’s Sartrean limbo, deftly echoed by offbeat visuals by harry k stammer, serve it strong with a side of dark humour that effectively obliterates the canned laughter of Cheers. After all, at One, nobody knows your name.
—Sacha Archer, author of cellsea and Empty Building

“From those formative years, he grew to invent “One,” a bar where each patron must drink alone. After hiring redhead bartenders and waiters because their hair was colored by passion, he became the bar’s most frequent patron.” 
Getting to One is a riveting sequence of adventures in thickly textured narrative vivid in detail and philosophically inventive. harry k stammer’s artwork complements the text by Eileen R. Tabios in a vivid and imaginative way. This volume is supercharged with smart contemporary references that open a host of philosophical challenges. Replete with solo Sundays, spies, extinct perfume, Polish 192-proof vodka, jellyfish, “Peacekeeper American Bourbon Whiskey that you’d bought for its bottle shaped like a mobile ICBM missile” and, nonfungible speculative comparisons of tequila consumption and “the amount of saliva a human produces in a lifetime—a volume sufficient to fill two swimming pools.” 
A universe of de facto orphans facing isolation and urgent habitual self-protection is flavored by rich lifelike detail relaying internal combat and the buildup of personal myth each one seeks to recite, proclaim, share. Does One connote a destination or a fate, or something altogether more plastic, the antithesis of NFTs “working as Pokemon cards”?
—Sheila E. Murphy, author of Permission to Relax, Sostenuto, and October Sequence (Sections 1-51)

~~

Selected Reviews/Reader Engagements:

… a pleasant distraction from all the destruction going on out there in the world
—from “Love Notes to Filipino Authors/Artists” by Leny M. Strobel, The Halo Halo Review, April 2024

Perhaps then, ‘One,’ is not a ‘bar’ where the Othered drink, but an ‘escapist[s] utopia’, ‘an artificial island’ in our minds and hearts—a bar so personal that it can only be reached by oneself and one’s soul-kin, because unfortunately, one must drink alone. Do Tabios and stammer believe we, humans and non-humans, are in effect dying alone? Tabios’ collaboration with stammer indicates not. Tabios’ oeuvre is impressive and I feel she has written an imaginative, dare I say, conflicted narrative in Getting To One. Her creative persistence to imagine and re-imagine ways show our solitude may be people’d through writing/art and collaboration shows how one can mature as a writer and artist. In storytelling, Tabios has written an aporia prevalent in a writer’s pursuit to be understood; and to consciously (even fictively) express isolation in her characters, to perhaps transcend her own.
—from Review by Harold Legaspi, The Halo Halo Review, December 2023 (review HERE)

Personally, I have mixed feelings about her work. I love their goriness, eroticism, simplicity, and elegance, but I also hate how her characters can become unlikable just as I’m starting to like them. // A rather slim book, you can finish it faster than you can down your bourbon. But don’t be fooled. Tabios’ characters can leave you more curious than when you first meet them.
—from “Sitting in a bar with fictionist Eileen Tabios,” Inquirer.net, Sept. 21, 2023

…beguiling
—Marianne Villanueva, author of Residents of the Deep

~~

Sample Art Based on the Flash Fiction “Polmost Spirytus Rektyfikowany Vodka”:

~~

Readers can wear anything to read this book, even though the writer’s dolls dressed to match the cover to mark the receipt of Author Copies, For authors, receiving their books for the first time is always a moment to celebrate: