DunceCap

"If a man paints a picture of a beefsteak on a plate very few people will ask, 'Who bought that beefsteak? at what shop? And what did he pay?' Those questions are made unnecessary by the skillful rendering of the lush red meat marbled with fat, the light glancing off the white porcelain plate-- I would like the fact of a good sentence to carry similar weight."

Alison Bundy was born in 1959 and grew up in Maine. She has an MFA from Brown University and has worked both as a teacher and a plumber. Her prose has appeared in journals like Ploughshares, Sulfur, Nimrod. Her first collection of stories, A Bad Business, was published by Lost Roads in 1985. Tale of a Good Cook was a Paradigm chapbook in 1990.

"The dunces Bundy creates resemble ourselves, with our unexplainable obsessions, our willful blindness to reality, our blunderings and embarrassments.... There's a sinister quality to Bundy's humor, a distance that elevates banal events and people to mysterious and often satirical proportions .... all are sudden fictions that strike with barbed wit and clemency."

– Kelly Everding, Rain Taxi