The Gunman and the Carnival: Stories (Paperback or Softback)

Timely and introspective, Catherine Gammon’s The Gunman and the Carnival is the meeting of contemporary voices and visions that offer not relatability, but an intimate encounter open to strangeness and its embrace. The stories in the inimitable Catherine Gammon’s The Gunman and the Carnival — loosely linked and set in Los Angeles, California — center on women of various ages and backgrounds. Constructed around themes of solitude and connection, creation and destruction, love and loss, these sixteen stories unfold in a world haunted by individual and collective violence, systemic injustice, pandemic, and environmental duress: not with genre sensibilities of the dystopic or apocalyptic, but with compassion and wisdom that renders a staid, meditative examination of our contemporary challenges. The Gunman and the Carnival does not aspire to be a panorama or to portray the city (or the nation) in its extraordinary complexity. Rather it shines a roving light into the minds and hearts of an idiosyncratic handful of characters living in our difficult times and invites each one to sing. Some of the stories are realist, some oblique and fragmented, others metafictional or surreal, and the urban / suburban landscapes are accented by the occasional appearance of wildlife and the presence (and voices) of trees. Handled with grace and intelligence, these stories chronicle contemporary struggles: the violence and the joy examined in equal measure. 

Catherine Gammon is author of the novels Isabel Out of the Rain, Sorrow, China Blue, and The Martyrs, The Lovers, and of the early story collection Beauty and the Beast. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others, as well as attending the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and Djerassi. 

After growing up in Los Angeles, Catherine lived in Berkeley, and later, in Ohio, Iowa, and Massachusetts before moving to New York, where she worked for The New York Review of Books. She left New York to join the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in 1992 and later returned to California for training and ordination at San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Dragon Temple/Green Gulch Farm. She lives again in Pittsburgh, with a garden and a cat.