Everyone Here Has a Gun: Stories (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction) - Hardcover

Southworth, Lucas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1625340532 ISBN 13: 9781625340535

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013

Synopsis

In a tightrope act of darkness and humor, fantasy and reality, the twelve stories in this award-winning collection describe characters searching for comfort and stability in a world that is ultimately too vast, violent, and incomprehensible. As they revert to what seems most simple and familiar―public transportation, television, museums, fairy tales―they discover only murder, displacement, fragmentation, and obsession.

In "The Running Legs and Other Stories," Mary Beth attempts to recall a traumatic experience from her childhood, filtering it through children's stories told by her "wicked" stepmother. In "Lincoln's Face, A Resurrection," an African American make-up artist struggles with concepts of history as she transforms a former lover into Abraham Lincoln. The young narrator in "Under the World" grieves for his parents by losing himself in a worldwide subway system. And in the title story, the speaker describes a small room where everyone armed with a single gun waits with dread and anticipation for the inevitable first shot.

Anton Chekhov famously noted that if a story introduces a gun in the first act, that gun must go off by the third. Yet while weapons are often present in Southworth's stories, they are rarely fired, existing instead as a constant reminder of the power people can have over each other and the violent potential of narrative itself.

About this title

About the Author:

Lucas Southworth grew up in Oak Park, IL and has studied writing at Knox College, Iowa State University and the University of Alabama, where he received his MFA. His stories can be found online and in print from Conjunctions, Mid-American Review, Willow Springs, Hayden's Ferry Review, West Branch, and others. He is an assistant professor in writing at Loyola University Maryland, where he specializes in teaching screenwriting and fiction. He also serves as an editor and partner of Slash Pine Press.

Review:

I once took pistol lessons with the author Joy Williams, and our instructor told us that each person on earth has an individual attacker. Lucas Southworth is the one I've been waiting for all these years--like that of your attacker, his brutal vision is aimed right at you in these phenomenal tales. --Kate Bernheimer, author of Horse, Flower, Bird

Lucas Southworth's impressive debut collection is at once haunting and funny. There is a tender creature at work here who produces in these stories a feeling of menace impossible to locate or shake. Southworth offers no comforting haven, no buy-out, no lie. He renders sensation with indelible precision and keeps his people bravely alive to the world--its dark pleasures and vivifying dangers --Noy Holland, author of Swim for the Little One First

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1625340532
• ISBN 13: 9781625340535
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176