Saturday Review: “Playing with Postmodern Pastiche” a review by Sharon Colley on Alan Michael Parker’s Bingo Bango Boingo, in NCLR Online Fall 2025
Like finding a box of unused cards at a flea market, Parker’s new collection sparks all kind of questions and ideas. “Each bingo card features a theme: “Change Your Life Bingo,” “Yard Sale Bingo,” or “Long Marriage Bingo.”” Do the phrases on the rows and columns go together? Are they supposed to?
Likewise, the flash fiction stories in the collection: how do they relate to each other? To the cards? Is there a whole?
Colley writes, “…a 2012 recipient of the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, [Parker] has earned the right to experiment with the juxtaposition of images and words found in his new volume.” She continues with perhaps the favorite phrase to be read in a review: “Bingo Bango Boingo is a fun book to read. The bingo cards provide a novel way to participate in creating narrative by pulling together fragments in good postmodernist style” and “entertaining collection of flash fiction that is not limited by its somewhat novel form.”
Read the entire review here! The book is available from the publisher or your favorite independent bookstore.
