Hicksters - by Jake Maynard (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From a fresh voice in American literature, in the tradition of Barry Hannah and Lucia Berlin, comes a linked collection of short stories inspired by the author's Pennsylvania hometown that interrogates the rural-urban divide with warmth, wry humor, and welcome audacity

Hicksters explores the lives of people straddling disparate worlds: urban and rural, addicted and sober, analog and digital. A recovering addict debates whether to share her Suboxone with her wayward daughter. A heartsick young woman returns home and makes a move on her old science teacher. An adjunct professor spars with a red-pilled student, two buddies leverage hipster foodways to get laid, and a broke phone-sex worker contends with the aftermath of an insurance scam gone wrong.

With an impetuous style, a clear-eyed love for Appalachia, and plenty of shade for liberal piety, these stories illuminate contemporary rural life and challenge the urban gaze through which it is viewed. In Hicksters, Jake Maynard delivers an irreverent, provocative, and deeply felt collection that leads us toward a fuller understanding of Rust Belt America.

Review Quotes

Praise for Hicksters:

"Hell yes to this exceptional collection of ferocious dispatches from an America that mostly gets flown over, talked over, stripped for parts, and then ignored until there's something to blame it for. Jake Maynard, a burgeoning master of the story form, brings ravaged lives to life with visionary precision and blood allegiance, but without condescension or pity, because he knows that attention itself is the highest form of respect a writer can pay. Hicksters is feral, foul, great-hearted, unflinching, and true."--Justin Taylor, author of Reboot

"Hicksters is singular and spectacular. These are stories for our American moment, sharing an honest, gritty, and intimate view of a place and its people, their decline and resilience, pathos and pride, softness and steel core. It's an astonishing collection: entertaining, heartbreaking, down-to-earth, needle-sharp, wild, and wildly funny."--Lauren Acampora, author of The Animal Room

"Rough and tender stories--the wild kind you hear after everyone else at the party has stumbled off to sleep. Yet, just your luck, a stranger with moonlit eyes remains, confessing the poignant events of their life, crickets singing all around you in the dark."--Bud Smith, author of Teenager

Praise for Slime Line:

"Maynard is a bold new American voice in fiction, and he's arrived with a fillet knife. Christ I loved this book."--Taylor Brown, author of Rednecks and Gods of Howl Mountain

"A cult classic is born. Jake Maynard's inspiring Slime Line is a backward glance at what the American novel could achieve before it got hijacked by English departments . . . Sinclair and Steinbeck would applaud this novel's eye, but it's Maynard's outrageous characters loosed upon the Alaskan seacoast that propel Slime Line into page-turning madness. Maynard gets every word right."--Lee Durkee, author of The Last Taxi Driver and Stalking Shakespeare

"Maynard's Slime Line is an arresting read that sinks its claws deep into your gut and dares you to blink. It's a story of hard work, loss, exploitation, and family set against a backdrop of blood, ice, and heavy machinery at an Alaskan fish processing plant peopled by misfits, scoundrels, and ghosts. You'll never look at a salmon filet the same way again."--Kim Kelly, author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor

"A bold and forceful and glorious book, like a beer bottle smashed to bits over your head, leaving you sticky with glass shards. Jake Maynard's Slime Line depicts the world how it really is, or one hard slice of it anyway: the puke-inducing Alaskan commercial fishing sector. You'll learn how to gut a salmon in one chapter, then how to lose a family in the next. In both cases, it's not pretty. ('Everything, ' as Maynard tells it, 'comes out clean except for the heart.') This is an eviscerating read, at once improbably raw and real."--Ben Purkert, author of The Men Can't be Saved

"Slime Line is a deeply compelling novel. Maynard's energetic prose is as gritty and raw as Alaska itself."--Callan Wink, author of August

"There aren't enough gross books about work. This is a story that hasn't yet been told, and thank goodness Maynard was in right place to bear witness and tell it. Slime Line is a wild romp, both compelling and educational. It will change how people approach fish processing--and work, even--in Alaska."--Brendan Jones, author of The Alaskan Laundry

"Slime Line is a stone-cold winner: a book about the dirty work of capitalism, searching for a missing father, and reckoning with your legacy. It's full of fish guts and lousy shifts, but it's also driven by a big, beating heart. I found it impossible to put down. As in all great books, the big catch here is the truth, and Jake Maynard hauls it in, one gorgeous sentence after another. Tender, musical, sad, funny as hell. Read it."--Steve Almond, author of All the Secrets of the World and Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow

About the Author

Jake Maynard is the author of the novel Slime Line. His stories and essays appear in Guernica, The Southern Review, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Volume 0, Electric Lit, and The New York Times' Modern Love column. Originally from McKean County, Pennsylvania, he works as a landscaper in Pittsburgh.