Kenneth Bernard is the author of eleven previous books, including the book-length poem The Baboon in the Nightclub, the novel From the District File, and Clown at Wall: A Kenneth Bernard Reader. Long associated with John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous, Bernard has been producing work in three genres continuously for roughly 40 years and has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEA, NEH, NY Creative Artists Public Service, and New York Foundation for the Arts grants. The stories in this collection originally appeared in more than a dozen different literary magazines, including Paris Review, New American Review, Fiction International, Salmagundi, Frank, Harper's, Iowa Review, Triquarterly, and Confrontation. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Massachusetts, Bernard has lived his entire adult life in New York City.

The Man in the Stretcher brings together 40 previously uncollected stories by this avant-garde playwright, poet, and fictionist, one of the most relentlessly and funnily experimental writers of our time.

"As with his poetry and drama, Kenneth Bernard's fictions present mind as theatrical display. His perverse plots are containers for a voicing that always acknowledges artifice and in this lies the strangeness of his comic vision: his speakers are crazy actors; their real lives are elsewhere, in some shadow world of danger and imminent explosion. And we see through to this world, though tentatively, and in our laughter fear it."    

- Toby Olson, author of the PEN/Faulkner Award Winning novel Seaview and Write Letter to Billy

"Kenneth Bernard is one of the most gloriously antic fiction writers we possess. Think of Salvador Dali or Giorgio de Chirico having written stories instead of painting and you are half way there. His pages have simultaneously awed and delighted me for years."

- David Markson, author of This is Not a Novel and Wittgenstein's Mistress

"Watch your back, reader, when you enter the world of Bernard's fiction, where everyone seems odd and unfamiliar, hopelessly trapped in odd and unfamiliar situations that threaten their sense of balance and well-being. The more your interest in them grows, so does the bull's eye between your shoulder blades."

- George Economou, poet, author of Century Dead Center. Economou has also just completed a translation of the poems and fragments of the ancient Greek poet, Ananios of Kleitor

"Kenneth Bernard has a bleak and shrewd Voltairean sensibility."

- Rochelle Owens, playwright and poet, author of Luca, Discourse on Life & Death, and Plays by Rochelle Owens

"In terms of scope, this book reminds me of those old, big Donald Barthelme collections, a virtual catalogue of stories and oddities. But in terms of the work itself, there is nothing like a Bernard story, which may begin with an innocuous Andy Rooney-like observation, then end a few pages later with you wondering whether the hardwood floor in your dining room will still support you."

- Ted Pelton, author of Endorsed by Jack Chapeau and Bhang