Anthony Venutolo
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Anthony Venutolo

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Anthony Venutolo has won five critical writing awards from the New Jersey Press Association and has appeared in such publications as Bikini, Details, POV and Playboy Online. He’s also written columns for the gambling magazines Chance, Casino Player and Strictly Slots. Online his flash fiction and poems have appeared at Zygote in My Coffee, Red Fez, Deuce Coupe, Gutter Eloquence, Shoots and Vines, Six Sentences and was a Revolutionary Voice at the site Drunken Absurdity. The former features editor at the Pulitzer Prize-winning Star-Ledger, is now a member of the Digital Operations team for New Jersey Advance Media. His first book Front Page Palooka was released in October, 2013 as part of the FIGHT CARD book series. It was nominated for three New Pulp Awards including Best Novella, Best New Writer and Best New Character. A multitude of Influences can be found in his poetry and fiction: The economical simplicity of Hemingway; the Skid Row rawness of Charles Bukowski; the understated genius of Raymond Carver; the poetry of Bruce Springsteen; the Chuck Buk-channeling of Tom Waits; the psychedelic dreaminess of Jim Morrison; the immigrant sensibilities of Bernard Malamud; the jazziness of Jack Kerouac; the quiet isolation of Edward Hopper; And let's not forget Richard Ford and Andre Dubus for the carrying on of Carver's sensibilities; the irony of O. Henry; the dreariness of Poe and the cool swagger of Sinatra, Dino and Sammy et al. PRAISE FOR ANTHONY VENUTOLO'S FLASH FICTION: In 1-2 page meteoric, magnesium-burning, retina-blinding flashes, Anthony Venutolo may be writing a fiction of the future that is technically, and decidedly, not science fiction. Part short story, borderline poetry, his "flash fiction"'s, as are quite possibly, with the imminent death of the moribund novel, the future of literature where everything'll be read on a Web-based phone, PDA or tablet. But don't let this "modern" format deter you from discovering these charmingly retro pieces that borrow heavily from film noir, detective fiction, Jorge Luis Borges and Bukowski a little (natch). Drolly funny, surreally pithy, they may herald, if Venutolo decides to stretch his considerable wings into the longer form, a unique, personal voice that has the timbre and dispassionate worldview of the hardboiled private eye novel, hearkening back, even as it speeds headlong and tangle-footed into the future, to a now bygone past. — Rex Pickett, author of ‘Sideways’ and ‘Vertical’ His web site is at AnthonyVenutolo.com and he blogs from Bukowski’s Basement.
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