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'Q+1 is a bonus book included with the four-novel Quadrants Series. The center point in Q+1 is, simply enough, the short story: an elastic vessel for fiction, able to accommodate narrative arcs, whether revealed in a chaptered micro-bildungsroman, as in Robert Ashley's'The Hardware Days Almost Gone'; manifested as computer instructions in Sumner Carnahan's'Authentic Incarnation'; told through the unreliable dual-point-of-view narrator in Thomas Frick's'Troubadour Awakening'; or, with a flash of epiphany, as in L. K. Larsen's'Leave a Message.'By pushing the short story in these ways, the works demonstrate the realization of Frick's narrator when he quotes literary theorist George Steiner:'Difficulty is the armature of meaning.'Certainly, many of the fourteen pieces in Q+1--and the novels they accompany--push story to its limits. And still the center holds.'--Julia Goldberg