Ether Sunday: A Formula One Fairytale

Winner of the 2025 Kenneth Patchen Award for Innovative Fiction In her encomium, judge Amy Kurman, author of Shorts (Black Scat Books, 2023), states the following: While this is in short format, it is wholly interesting and thought provoking. It reads as to the timing of a metronome, you can almost hear the timer ticking in the background. The concept is of push and pull, of incongruence paired together. Each short-stated, conflicting idea prompts the reader to conjure images that test both the creative and intellectual sides of the brain. Quickly though, because you must keep time and move on to the next thought. Ether Sunday evokes current states of affairs in the world and then mixes them with spiked traditional ideals. This was a real treat, a special find within the grass of an Ether basket (case). Other advance praise from the book has come from Mark Amerika, Derek Pell, and Joseph Darlington! “Reading Erik Belgum’s Ether Sunday is like eavesdropping on language’s interior monologue with itself. The illegitimate child of Gertrude Stein and George Carlin, this is Belgum’s best work yet. An uproarious polyphonic performance!” -- Mark Amerika, author of My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence "Once below the surface of Belgum's Ether Sunday -- a savage pool of experimental wordplay -- you'll forget to come up for air. You'll have been baptized & blasphemed by a master. — Derek Pell, author of Naked Lunch at Tiffany’s "Belgum's writing is alive with the raw texture of words. Everything is palpable; jagged edges prodding and poking around in your mouth. Words going back to their origins in sound. Ether Sunday is compulsively readable. A valuable addition to any experimentalist's bookshelf." -- Joseph Darlington, author of The Experimentalists