Artwork – Spare Parts – Anders Flagstad Author Website

COVER OF BOOK (both front and back, spread out without text)

The setting of Spare Parts is San Francisco, so an image of the Golden Gate bridge seemed appropriate. The background is a much-worked-over beach sunset that (also appropriately, as many of the characters are LGBT folk) blurs out into an intense electric rainbow flag.

FRONTISPIECE

Some suspiciously suspicious yellow somebodies crossing (or maybe lurking?) in front of the former club called BBuddies in South of Market San Francisco (oh yeah, lurking in the rain, too, of course, which isn’t suspicious at all, is it?).

SHORT STORY CHAPTER HEADING PICS

Since the series of these books (Thad and Spare Parts) is Principal Parts and the title of this book is Spare Parts – of course, all the chapters and their images have something to do with parts

SHORT STORY #1 Chapter Heading Pic – In this short story Part in the Middle, Alice has her hands full changing from a Texan to a Californian – but that’s the least of her worries. Basically her life is a continuous explosion now, like a million nuclear bombs going off constantly every minute. It’s a little like living on the sun. Tricky to manage, but worth the pain.

SHORT STORY #2 Chapter Heading Pic – Heinekens and the Later Roman Empire and Survival of the Fittest – as well as Clubbing – these are the interests of the singulary, single young man in single-friendly San Francisco – all in short story #2 Participles.

SHORT STORY #3 Chapter Heading Pic – in the short story Four Compartments – John Chin’s four compartments of life are all filled this year with farting, laughing men and giggling children. Except the last compartment. And that contains only the entire universe.

SHORT STORY #4 Chapter Heading Pic – Death comes for the circuit party boy also – although not quite as romantically as he does for others (in the story Party Line, that is).

SHORT STORY #5 Chapter Heading Pic – A bus trip from nowhere to nowhere can sometimes be the connection between a poorly-remembered past and a not-quite-thought-out future – over and over and over and over and over again (in the short story His Parts in Joy).

SHORT STORY #6 Chapter Heading Pic – In the story Two Part Invention, Two melodies, one song – and neither melody gets to decide when it starts, when it stops, or what it sings. And that’s O.K.

SHORT STORY #7 Chapter Heading Pic – The final short story in this collection called Spare Parts is ALSO called Spare Parts and it celebrates the parts of our lives (the majority of the parts of our lives) that are made up of the small, the insignificant, the forgotten – and these forgotten parts are (in truth) the most important things of all – we are them, and they are us.