Widely celebrated, Erin McGraw returns with her strongest collection yet, stories that will haunt you and amuse you and are impossible to forget.
Erin McGraw, born and raised in Southern California, lived and taught for many years in the Midwest before retiring to rural Tennessee with her husband, poet Andrew Hudgins, and her dogs. She has written six previous books—three novels and three collections of storie—along with essays and occasional journalism.
Claire Messud described Erin McGraw’s last collection of stories as “at once laugh-out-loud funny and utterly serious, exploring] life’s profundity through its details.” This is even more true with McGraw’s new collection, Joy.
In these very short stories, narrators step out of themselves to explain their lives to us, sometimes defensively, sometimes regretfully, other times deceitfully. Voices include those of the impulsive first-time murderer, the depressed pet sitter, the assistant of Patsy Cline, the anxiety-riddled new mother, the aged rock-and-roller, the girlfriend of your husband—human beings often (incredibly) unaware of the turning points staring them in the face.
Crossing time, states, class, and religions, McGraw’s stories are on the edge, causing you to wince even as you laugh. And McGraw will draw you to a deep need to read some sentences aloud—a sweet voice, a shrewd insight, some uneasy charm.
From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, this is a masterful tale of wilderness survival in the vein of Into the Wild and The Call of the Wild. It is the story of two college friends on a wilderness canoe trip–a gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence.
PETER HELLER is the national best-selling author of Celine, The Painter, and The Dog Stars. The Painter was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the prestigious Reading the West Book Award, shared in the past by Western writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Terry Tempest Williams, and The Dog Stars, which was published to critical acclaim and lauded as a breakout bestseller, has been published in twenty-two languages to date. Heller is also the author of four nonfiction books, including Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, which was awarded the National Outdoor Book Award for Literature.
He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in poetry and fiction and lives in Denver, Colorado.
Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddles and picking blueberries and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey. When they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank and decide to warn them about the fire, their search for the pair turns up nothing and no one. But: The next day a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the man they heard? And, if he is, where is the woman? From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller, unspools a headlong, heart-pounding story of desperate wilderness survival.
