By day, I'm I work on the Digital Operations Team in the newsroom of NJ Advance Media, home of the Pultizer Prize-winning Star-Ledger newspaper and its web site NJ.com. When I'm not in HTML, social media or SEO Hell, I also dabble in writing fiction and a small bit of poetry.
On the features and news front, I've freelanced for such magazines as Bikini, Details, Chance, Men's Health and Playboy Online. I also wrote a column for the gambling magazines Casino Player and Strictly Slots.
Online, my flash fiction and poems have appeared at Zygote in My Coffee, Red Fez, Deuce Coupe, Gutter Eloquence, Shoots and Vines and Six Sentences.
My pulp novella 'FRONT PAGE PALOOKA' was released September 2013. A follow-up collection of short stories, 'BOURBON & BLONDES,' was released November 1.
Influences: The simplicity of Hemingway; the Skid Row rawness of Charles Bukowski; the understated genius of Raymond Carver; the poetry of Bruce Springsteen; the Chuck Buk-channeling of Tom Waits; the psychedelic dreaminess of Jim Morrison; the immigrant sensibilities of Bernard Malamud; the jazziness of Jack Kerouac; the quiet isolation of Edward Hopper; And let's not forget Richard Ford and Andre Dubus for the carrying on of Carver's sensibilities; the irony of O. Henry; the dreariness of Poe and the cool swagger of Sinatra, Dino and Sammy et al.
PRAISE FOR ANTHONY VENUTOLO'S FLASH FICTION:
In 1-2 page meteoric, magnesium-burning, retina-blinding flashes, Anthony Venutolo may be writing a fiction of the future that is technically, and decidedly, not science fiction. Part short story, borderline poetry, his "flash fiction"'s, as are quite possibly, with the imminent death of the moribund novel, the future of literature where everything'll be read on a Web-based phone, PDA or tablet. But don't let this "modern" format deter you from discovering these charmingly retro pieces that borrow heavily from film noir, detective fiction, Jorge Luis Borges and Bukowski a little (natch). Drolly funny, surreally pithy, they may herald, if Venutolo decides to stretch his considerable wings into the longer form, a unique, personal voice that has the timbre and dispassionate worldview of the hardboiled private eye novel, hearkening back, even as it speeds headlong and tangle-footed into the future, to a now bygone past.
— Rex Pickett, author of ‘Sideways’ and ‘Vertical’
Buy his pulp novel FRONT PAGE PALOOKA now at Amazon
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