About this item
Highlights
- An inventive, ranging debut story collection from a writer hailed by Charles Yu as "a stunningly original voice--warm, bleak, dark, ecstatic, full of silences and power and life" Reinventing a great American tradition through an absurdist, discerning eye, Joseph Scapellato uses these twenty-five stories to conjure worlds, themes, and characters who are at once unquestionably familiar and undeniably strange.
- About the Author: JOSEPH SCAPELLATO's fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review online, Gulf Coast, Post Road, and other journals, and has been anthologized in Forty Stories, Gigantic Worlds: An Anthology of Science Flash Fiction, and The Best Innovative Writing.
- 192 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Short Stories (single author)
Description
About the Book
An inventive, ranging debut story collection from a writer hailed by Charles Yu as "a stunningly original voice--warm, bleak, dark, ecstatic, full of silences and power and life"Book Synopsis
An inventive, ranging debut story collection from a writer hailed by Charles Yu as "a stunningly original voice--warm, bleak, dark, ecstatic, full of silences and power and life" Reinventing a great American tradition through an absurdist, discerning eye, Joseph Scapellato uses these twenty-five stories to conjure worlds, themes, and characters who are at once unquestionably familiar and undeniably strange. Big Lonesome navigates through the American West--from the Old West to the modern-day West to the Midwest, from cowboys to mythical creatures to everything in between--exploring place, myth, masculinity, and what it means to be whole or to be broken.Though he works in the tradition of George Saunders and Patrick deWitt--writing subversive, surreal, and affecting stories that unveil the surprising inner lives of ordinary people and the mythic dimensions of our everyday lives--"Scapellato's Big Lonesome is unlike anything else you've ever read" (Robert Boswell).
Review Quotes
"Vividly recasting many Western archetypes, Scapellato's inventive, hallucinatory prose dazzles...Normally quotidian encounters become epic in Scapellato's worlds, and the sentences [...] exquisitely fashion routine encounters into much more...A timely dose of his absurdism could prove an antivenom to our problematic times."--New York Times Book Review "Rich with refined poeticism and imagination...Original and gripping, with several exceptional entries towards the end that reveal Scapellato as a masterful storyteller...Big Lonesome [is] a noteworthy collection cumulatively, [and its best stories] highlight the promise of Scapellato's next project."--PopMatters "Often amusing, thoughtful and poetic, Big Lonesome is a weird and wildly inventive collection of 25 uniquely imagined short stories focused on the mythologies of the American West and the archetypal nomadic characters who roam the vast, pockmarked, barren landscape...Affecting and utterly unique, Scapellato's absurd reimagining of the roughed-up, Stetson-wearing cowboy who once inhabited the American West will startle and surprise those accustomed to Western fiction. Big Lonesome is an impressive debut story collection by a canny, poetically talented storyteller."--Lancashire Evening Post "The stories in the first section update the Western tall tale as post-modern trickster narrative. The spirit of Sut Lovingood, George Washington Harris's Old Southwestern version on Huck Finn, which inspired Twain and Faulkner, returns to disrupt rather than instruct. Whereas Sut concocted revenge pranks to satirize preachers, politicians, and other targets of regional scorn, Scapellato's unnamed cowboys raise their pistols to all before locking eyes on themselves...Scapellato's gift is to convey the collapse of his characters with the sparest language and thrift of detail...[He] defies genre expectation...The trajectory of redemption suggests Flannery O'Connor at her best."--Brooklyn Rail "Scapellato's first collection of short fiction means to bust the mythologies of the American West. In these 25 stories, Scapellato moves from the allegorical to the (almost) natural, traversing the territory with a fluid grace...Scapellato's debut is unpredictable, witty, and self-aware while remaining heartfelt in the most unexpected ways."--Kirkus Reviews "Scapellato's refreshing stories engage at every point and are capped off with perfect endings. Scapellato is an exceptional surrealist, and he seems to have a firm handle on his own exuberance and quirkiness, his characters reminiscent of familiar archetypes but served with a twist. His subjects never wander far from cowboys, cowgirls, and the myths of the cinematic West. His short stories have a lean trajectory and economy. ..This debut collection is bracing and delightful."--Publishers Weekly "These 25 stories range from the mythic and bizarre to the modern and incisively realistic...genre-blending."--Booklist "Through a careful give and take between familiar imagery and surrealist flourishes, Joseph Scapellato's debut collection Big Lonesome is a subversive love letter to The Wild West...[with] a Saunders-like sense of compassion and empathy."--Various Small Flames "Joseph Scapellato's collection is a lot of things: risky, honest, and romantic --
About the Author
JOSEPH SCAPELLATO's fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review online, Gulf Coast, Post Road, and other journals, and has been anthologized in Forty Stories, Gigantic Worlds: An Anthology of Science Flash Fiction, and The Best Innovative Writing. He teaches at Bucknell University. Big Lonesome is his first book.