Everything Happens to Me

Peter Cherches

This episodic novel chronicles the trials and tribulations of Peter Cherches, an obscure Brooklyn writer who suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous tormentors, most notably his next-door neighbor. Cherches’s world is overrun with doppelgängers, doppelgängers’ doppelgängers, malevolent technology, masks, doubts, and unreliable mirrors. Think of this as a kinder and gentler Book of Job, with New York attitude and borscht belt humor, as well as echoes of Kafka, Borges, and Serling. Rarely has one man’s misery been so much fun.


“Peter Cherches is required reading for all humans. He is one of a kind, a man without equal, a different breed of cat, a horse of a different color, the cream in your coffee, the sugar in your tea, off the beaten track, and a real piece of work.” Jon Scieszka, author of The Stinky Cheese Man and The Real Dada Mother Goose

“For more than four decades, Peter Cherches has been recomposing his Brooklyn surroundings into a comic jazz of the imagination, a playground in which the subconscious and the absurd play side by side. With Everything Happens to Me, the flash fiction maestro is at it again, taking us for a stroll across a boardwalk with no beginning or end, into the realm of the uncanny, making rhythm out of rumination and mystery out of mischief, only this time, lucky for us, at a novel’s length. A writer who gives readers the giggles like no other, Cherches is a New Yawk original. ” Joshua Kornreich, author of Cavanaugh and Horsebuggy

Called “one of the innovators of the short short story” by Publishers Weekly, Peter Cherches is a writer, singer and lyricist. Over the past 40 years his writing, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in dozens of magazines, anthologies and websites. His first recording as a jazz vocalist, Mercerized! Songs of Johnny Mercer, was released in 2016. He is the author of three previous prose collections, including Lift Your Right Arm, Autobiography Without Words, and Whistler’s Mother’s Son, published by Pelekinesis. Cherches is a native of Brooklyn, New York.