Guess This Is Kaput

A wonderful, poignant collection you’ll want to read again and again.”

–Annell López, PEN/Robert Bingham Award Finalist and author of I’ll Give You a Reason

“Guess This Is Kaput is Andes at his best: soulful, funny, offbeat, humane. Let me add: necessary. Andes is a necessary voice for these berserk times. These stories are a shot in the arm, and weirdly, somehow, a solace.”

–Peter Orner, author of Esther Stories and Maggie Brown & Others

“Somehow clear eyed and bleary eyed, these are trips worth taking.”

–Dean Schlabowske of the Waco Brothers

A laborer at a shipping facility in Northwest Arkansas is written up for using a homophobic slur, forcing him to reckon with the ways he idolizes his philandering, country-singing daddy. A woman comes home to rural New Hampshire to care for her father after his motorcycle accident but runs into her dirtbag ex. On the same day a racist ex-San Francisco cop is pushed to the breaking point by a conflict with the couple moving in next door, his wife tells him she wants a divorce. A musician coming home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire tries to build a life with the woman he loves, only to be derailed when his one-time best friend, who is also her ex and the father of her child, gets out of prison.

In Guess This Is Kaput, characters are forced to grow, sometimes evolving and redeeming themselves through love, and sometimes failing to evolve in spectacular fashion. Set across the country in the Bay Area, New England, Northwest Arkansas, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the stories are informed by a powerful sense of setting, dramatizing the ways in which place entangles us. Trapped by family, by lovers past and present, and by their own flawed ideas of who they are, the characters in these stories struggle to achieve sometimes dubious ideas of freedom.

Cowboy Jamboree Press
good grit lit.