I’M NOT SAYING, I’M JUST SAYING

A man who learns he has a 5-year-old son is caught between the life he knows and a life he may not yet be ready for. I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying is a raw, honest look at parenting, commitment, morality, and the spaces that grow between and within us when we don’t know what to say.

“An absolute stunner of a novel… as if to say: This, this is life! And we are all, in one way or another, survivors.”
– Kathy Fish, author of Together We Can Bury It

“Poetic, unforgettable, shot through with fury and yearning… captures in clear and chilling flashes our capacity for the cruelty and tenderness of love.”
–Catherine Chung, author of Forgotten Country

“[Reveals] both the people we have been, and the better people we might be lucky enough to one day hope to become.”
– Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

“The messiness of life, family, love in its myriad complex forms… a pointillist masterpiece.”
– Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of Somebody’s Daughter

“Provocative, beautiful, and at times, brutally raw… these vignettes build with tension and trepidation, until we, like the members of this reluctant, fractured family, realize the weight, burden and comfort that only comes from finally belonging.”
– Aimee Phan, author of The Reeducation of Cherry Truong

“Salesses is a practitioner of the art of flash fiction who created 115 short works that each have an interior narrative arc and also come together as a novel.”
—Celeste Sollod, Baltimore Style

“Lovely and heartbreaking and tender and wicked all at the same time.”
—Lori Hettler, The Next Best Book Club Blog, 4 stars

“It takes guts to put everything into a few sentences per page. I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying provides laughter and heartache. The novel’s pieces connect quickly and concisely, but you will think about each of them, and the sentences that compose them, for a long time afterward.”
—Peter Fontaine, NANO Fiction

“A novel that manages, in few words, to devastate with its honesty and fearlessness.”
—Jonathan Crowl, [PANK]

“Salesses didn’t choose an easy path, but he walked it well and honestly. His novel engages the reader while at the same time challenging ideas of what a novel can and should be.”
—Mike Tager, JMWW

“The novel acts as a beautiful portrait of self-discovery, and does so through an innovative narrative frame.”
—Tawnysha Greene, Sundress Publications

“Salesses deftly delivers a story that is at turns sad, funny, heartbreaking, and hopeful, but always open and honest about the messiness of life.”
—Gina Myers, Frontier Psychiatrist

“I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying is about caring for others when you can’t manage to care for yourself.”
—David Plick, Down and Out

“Not unlike burning through an entire season of some show available on Netflix because you are compelled so by the characters and by your own want, to know them, to understand them, to see how it all works out.”
—tinyprivatejet, via Land of Gazillion Adoptees

Deceptively simple on the outside, utterly complicated on the inside, Salesses’s I’m Not Saying I’m Just Saying masterfully wields the short-short form. His startling sentences reveal the intimacies and intricacies of one man’s shaky relationships.
—Angela Palm, BookTrib

Excerpts can be found in:
The Nervous Breakdown, Salt Hill, Wigleaf, Hyphen Magazine, The Collagist, Puerto del Sol, Atticus Review, Spork, elimae, Corium, Everyday Genius, NANO Fiction, Beat the Dust, The Lifted Brow, Storyglossia, The Literarian, Blip, and JMWW