HIGHWAY TRADE

“John Domini is one of those rare writers who doesn’t bend his characters towards his own pre-determined ends, but follows where they lead. In lesser hands, Domini’s people would have been drowned in bathos. But Domini honors them with a generous but unsentimental imagination, giving us lives worth knowing about, layered portrayals of the obdurate world and our own terrifying self-betrayals. His profound, unflinching attention reminds us how closely together fiction, at its best, can unite justice with mercy.”

―Jay Cantor

“John Domini’s densely textured stories teem with compelling inner and outer life. He is a master at capturing the complex workings of minds under stress and the hard-edged negotiations we make with fate when our backs are against a wall. He knows how women and men can behave with one another. The stories move swiftly and sinuously, emerging from the everyday to coil around a reader’s heart.”

―Floyd Skloot

“Fiery, crackling prose. Domini’s writing wields a double-bladed humor that is both fearsomely entertaining and pleasurably dark. Highway Trade is a sharp and compassionate work; unforgettable.”

―Diana Abu-Jaber

"Domini is a rare writer who doesn't bend his characters towards his own pre-determined ends, but follows where they lead." -- Jay Cantor

"Domini shows us the way we live...witty, biting portraits of todays men and women...strong sentences...and vivid scenes." -- Alan Cheuse

"Domini's prose is so stark and quick, it's as if a stroke of lightning burned the words into print." -- Janice Daugharty

"Fiery, crackling prose...a double-bladed humor...fearsomely entertaining and pleasurably dark...unforgettable." -- Diana Abu-Jaber

"[These] stories move swiftly and sinuously, emerging from the everyday to coil around a reader's heart." -- Floyd Skyloot

In Domini's novella ... and in most of the other stories, he postures to no apparent end; in terms of narrative, it seems, he has more to prove than to give. -- The New York Times Book Review, Norah Vincent

The reader will wonder at times at how the author can get inside the heads of characters whose backgrounds are so different from his own.... It's sometimes called giving blood, this kind of stand-up writing, and it's the juice that fuels "Highway Trade". -- The Oregonian July 5, 1998