Bøger af Mark Brazaitis

A grandfather reluctantly raising his seven-year-old granddaughter throws her a birthday party to which no one comes-and she's delighted. A former hockey player, about to become a father, suffers flashbacks to times his coach sexually abused him. A one-time Olympic hopeful reveals the heartbreaking reason she failed to land her signature jump-and thereby frees herself to find her next passion. Winner of Prize Americana, The Rink Girl may have a small geographic setting-an ice arena in an unassuming Ohio town-but it's wide in thematic scope: from depression and war to the perils and pleasures of parenting and the thrill (and aching brevity) of first love.

Winner of the 2014 Autumn House Press Fiction Contest, selected by Sharon Dilworth.

In his latest collection of literary fiction, Mark Brazaitis evokes with sympathy, insight, and humor the lives of characters in a small Ohio town. The ten short stories of The Incurables limn the mental landscape of people facing conditions they believe are insolvable, from the oppressive horrors of mental illness to the beguiling and baffling complexities of romantic and familial love. In the book's opening story, "e;The Bridge,"e; a new sheriff must confront a suicide epidemic as well as his own deteriorating mental health. In "e;Classmates,"e; a man sets off to visit the wife of a classmate who has killed himself. Is he hoping to write a story about his classmate or to observe the aftermath of what his own suicide attempt, if successful, would have been like? In the title story, a down-on-his-luck porn actor returns to his hometown and winds up in the mental health ward of the local hospital, where he meets a captivating woman. Other stories in the collection include "e;A Map of the Forbidden,"e; about a straight-laced man who is tempted to cheat on his wife after his adulterous father dies, and "e;The Boy behind the Tree,"e; about a problematic father-son relationship made more so by the arrival on the scene of a young man the son's age. In "e;I Return,"e; a father narrates a story from the afterlife, discovering as he does so that he is not as indispensable to his family as he had believed.