SHOOTING THE WIRE Format: Paperback

Fiction. This is a significant novel featuring Ted, a white, privileged middle-class man, struggling to come to terms with his disintegrating extended family of eccentrics, addicts, and potential-killers—and how they should fit into the emerging new scheme (or chaos) of 21st century American life. From racism to immigration, religion to shooting sprees, social media to dementia, this is a funny, smart, and sometimes acerbically-startling dissection of a society on the edge.

Robert D. Kirvel holds a PhD in neuropsychology and is a twotime Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee for fiction. In addition to winning the Chautauqua 2017 Editor's Prize for an essay on growing up gay in the United States and United Kingdom, he was awarded the 2016 Fulton Prize for the Short Story and a 2015 ArtPrize for creative nonfiction. He lives in the culturally diverse San Francisco Bay Area, except when he communes with grizzly bears and other critters at his Montana cabin.