Fiction. African American Studies. Latino/Latina Studies. HARD TIMES BLUES is Elwin Cotman's second collection of fantasies, following his Carl Brandon Award-nominated debut THE JACK DANIELS SESSIONS EP (Six Gallery Press, 2010). These five lyrical and satirical fables look at the lives of the alienated and dispossessed through a fabulist lens. HARD TIMES BLUES contains four short stories—"The Elvis Room," in which two young hobos spend a terrifying night in a Raleigh, NC bed and breakfast; "Pulp," a prose poem celebrating the magical history of San Francisco; "The Revelation of John," a somber apocalypse set along the banks of the Mississippi; and "A Song for the Yellow Prince," the story of three musical prodigies and their demons—and one novella, "Graveyard Shift," in which a big-box chain puts the reanimated corpses of its employees back to work. Cotman writes American fairy tales for a 21st-century audience. "Elwin Cotman's carefully wrought, gracefully accomplished, and lyrical narratives range in tone and style from picaresque and carnivalesque to elegiac, ironic, and melancholy. Yet, while tonally distinctive and aesthetically vivid, his stories are not so much driven by style or voice, as they are by love in the largest sense. For love does not exclude chaos nor avoid the vicissitudes of history and neither do Cotman's socially engaged, brilliantly crafted stories."—Miranda Mellis