A one-legged news vendor with a dilapidated newsstand. An exotic dancer with a penchant for witchcraft. An existentialist narrator who devises a plan to fade out of his own life in a subversive and comically absurd attempt at self-preservation, leaving his partner and two children with no memory of him.

Comparable only to Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis as an allegory of transformation, reality, and the absurdity of human existence; The Last News Vendor is a dreamlike meditation on broken spirituality, a collapsing society, and the overburdened contemporary soul.

The author of a clutch of novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections, MICHAEL MIROLLA describes his writing as a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta—fiction. Publications include the novel Berlin (a 2010 Bressani Prize winner); The Facility, which features among other things a string of cloned Mussolinis; and The Giulio Metaphysics III, a novel/linked short story collection wherein a character named "Giulio" battles for freedom from his own creator.
Other publications include the short story collection The Formal Logic of Emotion; a punk novella, The Ballad of Martin B.; and two collections of poetry: Light and Time, and The House on 14th Avenue (2014 Bressani Prize). His short story collection, Lessons in Relationship Dyads, from Red Hen Press in California, took the 2016 Bressani Prize. The novel Torp: The Landlord, The Husband, The Wife and The Lover, set in 1970 Vancouver during the War Measures Act, was published in 2016 (Linda Leith Publishing). 2017 saw the publication of the magic realist short story collection The Photographer in Search of Death (Exile Editions). A novella, The Last News Vendor, published in the fall of 2019 (Quattro), received a Readers' View, Reviewers' Choice Award. A speculative fiction collection, Paradise Islands & Other Galaxies (Exile Editions), was published in the fall of 2020. The short story, "A Theory of Discontinuous Existence," was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology; and "The Sand Flea" was a Pushcart Prize nominee. In the fall of 2019, Michael served a three—month writer's residency at the Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, during which time he finished the first draft of a novel, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael now makes his home in Hamilton. For more information, http://www.michaelmirolla.com/index.html.

Michael Mirolla's profile page

"When fantasy pushes aside the lucid remonstrances of the banal, that is where you will find Michael Mirolla. He has delivered in his newest novella, The Last News Vendor, the quintessential metamorphosis of the observer to the observed and at the cutting edge of literary metaphors." -- Ian Thomas Shaw, Ottawa Review of Books.

One wonders in reading Michael Mirolla's The Last News Vendor whether he isn't inspired by the Japanese painter Hirosige of the ukiyo-e tradition. Mirolla uses concrete props - porn and printers ink, grease and tattoos, vinyl and vice - as gateways to the coded revelations of the inner city night. Reading The Last News Vendor was like stumbling across an illicit act in flagrante delicto, and finding yourself unable to pull away. He describes a universe that is tactile rather than virtual, and which had me recalling two other tales of things disappearing, never to return - John Fowles' "The Collector" and Doris Lessing's "Briefing for a Descent into Hell". -- David MacKinnon, author of A Voluntary Crucifixion and Leper Tango.

"The truth about the truth is that it gets into everything, but Michael Mirolla does not let the mulling interfere with the buzzing, with all that we have forgotten. As for what's not in this book, well that's his too, he's just lucky that way." -- Claudio Gaudio, author of Texas.