Gregory Alan Norton
Greg Norton comes from a French speaking family of coal miners and factory workers. He came of age with the generation of 1968 and spent much of the 1960s as a student radical in organizations like SDS organizing against the Vietnam War. A street fighter, union organizer, labor editor, and life long fiction writer, he’s got the old school pedigree of an American literary writer: taxi driver, factory worker, teacher, and office worker. You can find photos of him on his web site on various picket lines. The short stories found in An Infinity of Days in the Psychotic Atomik Empire reflect his background in the streets and factories of Chicago. He likes to write about the average person who is worried about their job, how they’re going to make their payments, and how to find human intimacy and love against the backdrop of society in an advanced state of decomposition. The stories in An Infinity of Days in the Psychotic Atomik Empire are “as real as the Hawk in January” as one reviewer put it. This book is just one interesting piece of his lifelong writing project that connects with his lifelong activism in the civil rights, peace, and labor movements. |
An Infinity of Days in the Psychotic Atomik Empire
This is Gregory Alan Norton’s first collection of short stories assembled from their original diverse publication in a wide array of litmags. These are wild tales with Chicago settings. The rich variety of characters includes college students, washed up middle-aged machinists, and young women set adrift in the work world by divorce - one of whom learns karate and flings her supervisor across the office in retaliation for sexual harassment. The stories deal with wide a variety of everyday employment situations in offices, factories, retail, and call centers. Norton's hallmark humor reveals the spontaneous resistance that arises to challenge the daily indignities of life we all experience. Youthful factory workers change the pre-recorded message of the product line of dolls they manufacture from “mama” to “Matilda Meinhoff is a fat Nazi pig” in response to unfair and inhumane treatment by an authoritarian supervisor. Another young woman enraged because of a pass-over for a promotion hijacks the company’s mainframe. Throughout these stories his everyday heroes maintain their dignity, fight for their civil rights, and affirm their humanity and love for each other in their struggle against the cultural onslaught of The Psychotic Atomik Empire. |