The Making Sense of Things

Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize

A grand tour of the edges of our lives, where glory and significance riot against the logic of living and the pall of tragedy.

The Making Sense of Things is a collection of twelve stories that pulse with memory, magic, and myth—all our favorite ways of trying to make sense of things.

Readers are treated to vivid and unforgettable characters. A fiercely independent woman puts the man who loves her to unconscionable tests, never guessing that arson, suicide, and canine obesity will yield a magical kind of happiness. A honeymooner in Venice, addled by fever and second thoughts, commits by dumb error a double murder. A brisk lawyer founders when a car wreck claims his son and ex-wife, then discovers that the desperation of grief is a kind of hope.

George Choundas is a former FBI agent, winner of the New Millennium Fiction Prize, and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee with work in over fifty publications, including The Best Small Fictions 2015. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, the St. Lawrence Book Award for Fiction, and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction.