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Drowned Boy is out. You can order it at
Sarabande Books,
Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Hopefully, you can also find a copy at an independent bookstore near you.
"These are rust-belt blues, then, a vision of and lament for a past time and a swiftly changing place. They're not showy-the language is plain, the tragedy muted, the comedy low-key and wry-but they stick in the mind. Ray Carver would recognize these characters and situations, as would poet Philip Levine. I like to think that that they would share my appreciation for this fine first book, built slowly and carefully over some years, and worth the wait." --Andrea Barrett, 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction Judge From the Back Cover Jerry Gabriel delivers an unsentimental portrait of rural America in Drowned Boy, a collection of linked stories that reveals a world of brutality, beauty, and danger in the forgotten landscape of small-town basketball tournaments and family reunions. In "Boys Industrial School," two brothers track an escaped juvenile convict, while in the title novella, a young man and woman embark on a haphazard journey to find meaning in the death of a high school classmate. Selected by Andrea Barrett for the 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, these stories probe the fraught cusp of adulthood, the frustrations of escape and difference, and the emotional territory of disappointment with Gabriel's assured, austere prose, set in the hardscrabble borderlands where Appalachia meets the Midwest. |