The Liar's Asylum - Softcover

Appel, Jacob M

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1625579756 ISBN 13: 9781625579751

Publisher: Black Lawrence Press, 2017

Synopsis

Fiction. "Jacob Appel's acrobatic imagination is always a thrill to watch in action. These stories fly through the air and grip your heart. Appel's naturalness as a storyteller makes THE LIARS' ASYLUM a total pleasure, a collection in a league of its own. Each story—there are no duds here—engages and entertains. Each is beautifully measured and composed, populated by characters I worried for, crushed on, and hoped with."—Kelly Luce

"In this excellent collection of stories, Jacob Appel mines everything for what it is and what it might be: the ordinary, the bizarre, the poignant. The voice, regardless of the narrator, is always crisp and exuberant, in ways subtle and fresh. I could say he is a writer to watch, but actually he is publishing well and frequently. He's a writer to read."—Fred Leebron

"While the plants and ponds might be aggressively artificial in Jacob Appel's newest collection of stories, there's not a single false note when it comes to Appel's characters and their intertwined lives. Romance blooms despite vast differences in ages and circumstance, and near connections plunge into a unique melancholy optimism that will propel readers from one story to the next."—Suzanne Greenberg

"Jacob M. Appel's brilliant new story collection manages to pull off the rarest of literary feats—delivering eight fantastic stories, each as entertaining as it is philosophically rich. A book of laugh-out-loud wit braided with intellectual fearlessness, THE LIARS' ASYLUM offers delights for the mind on every page. Best of all, these irreverent, lovingly subversive stories upend dusty assumptions about what it means to be alive and allow the reader to experience her own existence with a fresh eye. A stunning book that will remain with you long after the last page is turned."—Alethea Black

"Across eight compelling stories, Jacob Appel offers us glimpses into the lives of people keeping secrets, broaching taboos, and testing the limits of their relationships. From a former teacher's suicide to an epidemic of storms that forces those caught in them to tell the truth, THE LIARS' ASYLUM beautifully and artfully exposes the mysteries and longings of the human heart."—Anne Valente

"Jacob M. Appel new collection, THE LIARS' ASYLUM, confirms his status as one of our most skillful, and appealing, practitioners of short fiction. Indeed, Appel is one of those blessed and nimble writers who, like Chekhov, can find a story anywhere. On ample display are his trademark first-person narrators (often young women), his deliciously light touch, his mastery of the 'reversal of fortune' moment. His new cast of characters includes a girl tasked with ensuring her aunt a 'beau,' an immigrant Finn who teaches us the meaning of endurance, and a ER psychiatrist dealing with a mass hysteria of truth-telling. Appel's fiction is a brilliant and reassuring example of Horace's maxim: The role of the artist is to inform and delight."—Catherine Browder

About this title

About the Author

Jacob M. Appel is a physician, attorney and bioethicist based in New York City. He is the author of more than two hundred published short stories and is a past winner of the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for the Short Story, the Dana Award, the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction, the North American Review's Kurt Vonnegut Prize, the Missouri Review's Editor's Prize, the Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize, the Briar Cliff Review's Short Fiction Prize, the H. E. Francis Prize, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Award in four different years, an Elizabeth George Fellowship and a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Writers Grant. His stories have been short-listed for the O. Henry Award, Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Mystery Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology on numerous occasions. His first novel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up, won the Dundee International Book Prize in 2012. Jacob holds graduate degrees from Brown University, Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, Harvard Law School, New York University's MFA program in fiction and Albany Medical College's Alden March Institute of Bioethics. He taught for many years at Brown University and currently teaches at the Gotham Writers' Workshop and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1625579756
• ISBN 13: 9781625579751
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 170