A father who searches for his son in Heaven; a rock band whose music is so bad it paralyzes from the waist down; a black-market vegetable genetically-modified for self-abuse -- these are just a few of the stories of melancholy and wonder inside The Gymnasium, the ground-breaking anthology that inspired the Literary Taxidermy Short Story Competition. By "re-stuffing" what goes in-between the opening and closing lines of classic works by Milan Kundera, Virginia Woolf, Richard Brautigan, Ian Fleming, and others, Mark Malamud has stitched together a wholly-original kind of fiction. You won't be disappointed. Learn more about literary taxidermy, as well as future contests, by visiting literarytaxidermy.com.