Richard Schmitt (BA, 1995) Overlook Press, 2000 ISBN: 1585670707 From an authentic American voice, a stunning, gritty tale of a young man’s retreat into the darkly glamorous world of the circus. Venice, Florida: On the edge of town sits the winter headquarters of a traveling circus. One day Gary, a drifter, signs up for a […]
Rhonda Riley (MFA, 1991) Ecco, 2013 ISBN: 9780062099440 In the waning months of World War II, young Evelyn Roe’s life is transformed when she finds what she takes to be a badly burned soldier, all but completely buried in the heavy red-clay soil on her family’s farm in North Carolina. When Evelyn rescues the stranger, […]
Dave Reidy (MFA, 2006) Ig Publishing, 2009 Francis Ford Coppola, REM, and Abe Vigoda are just a few of the many characters who populate the world of Captive Audience, Dave Reidy’s paean to the highs, lows, and everything in-between of being a performer. From the opening story, the award-winning “The Regular,” where two lonely music […]
Imad Rahman (MFA, 2001) Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004 ISBN: 0374174016 When B-movie-grade actor Kareem Abdul-Jabbar opens the mail one day, he find a one-way bus ticket to Cleveland and a note from his ex-girlfriend Eileen that reads, “Good news. I am through with big dicks and henceforth thinking constantly of you.” So begin the […]
Jason Ockert (BA, 1995) Low Fidelity Press, 2006 ISBN: 9780972336352 Riotously funny, beautifully written, and charged with emotional intelligence, this well-crafted debut investigates the world from the fringe through characters who stray so far from convention they seem to inhabit another universe. Whether it’s Alston Goldstein ferrying drugs around Florida on his yellow moped, a […]
Jason Ockert (BA, 1995) Dzanc Books, 2013 ISBN: 9781938604478 Neighbors of Nothing examines characters who find themselves searching for new identities in worlds they no longer recognize. In “Piebald,” parents assume the identity of their dead son; in “Everyday Murders,” the sole survivor of a violent crime attempts to confront an online entrepreneur who sells football-style […]
Jason Ockert (BA, 1995) Panhandler Books, 2015 When a soldier returning home to a small New York town inadvertently transports an invasive species of deadly parasitic wasps, he sets off a frightening chain of events that throws an entire community into an unpredictable crisis. The wasps grow in number to a few thousand in only […]
Christina Nichol (MFA, 2012) Overlook, 2012 ISBN: 9781468306866 A gleeful picaresque, a hilarious satire, and a work of extraordinary empathy and imagination, Waiting for the Electricity is a marvelously imaginative debut novel in the tradition of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated and Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan. In the republic of Georgia, the Communists are long gone, replaced by … well, […]
Kevin Moffett (BA, 1996; MFA pending) Harper Perennial, 2012 ISBN: 9780062069221 A dazzling new story collection from brilliant, young, award-winning writer Kevin Moffett, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events illuminates the intimate experiences of characters caught between aspiration and achievement, uncertainty and illumination, inertia and discovery, the past and the future. Channeling unexpected, eclectic voices in a collection […]
Kevin Moffett (BA, 1996; MFA pending) University of Iowa, 2006 ISBN: 0877459924 Settled amid the seasonal amusements and condominium-lined beaches of the Florida coast, the characters who inhabit Kevin Moffett’s award-winning stories reach out of their lives to find that something unexpected and mysterious has replaced what used to be familiar. The world of Permanent Visitors is […]