Fantastic Fictions is a 2023 Sam Pink book, a cohesive statement of intent sick with a generous spirit, juiced of spontaneity and crackling, kindling nerve connections by the most industrious and recognizable stalwart there is, a standard bearer of household names, a DIY icon whose signature has smeared into the most splendidly surprising shapes, whose wheelhouse is the stoic, axiomatic narrative, humanistic and sobering, anarchically funny, a ballast against the terrifying and crushing forces of life you can’t brace against. Pink is pure offense, inflicting the modern world in toto with his probing, agile sentences which are simultaneously dense with inference and infinitely memeable, iconic, punchy and permutable like tattoos or anthems or handguns. Sam Pink is an American original, a rough trader, increasingly a man without a country, a firebrand lodestar and this book wastes no words not having anything to prove. In a dozen stories, Sam Pink spills ink for violent headwinds always incoming, for oases of calm, and everything in between, all the interstices of your day. A book that makes it easier, and other trite things I could write. From an indomitable titan whose first loves are artisanal. A wrecking ball, a moment of truth equal to the circumstances, out of step but never out of style. Your war machine is ready.