The Champ is Here - by Nathan Dragon (Paperback)
About this item
Highlights
- Nathan Dragon's The Champ is Here is a loosely-linked collection that follows, with varying distance, an unnamed narrator, his dog, and girlfriend or wife, from small American town to town.
- Author(s): Nathan Dragon
- 170 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Short Stories (single author)
Description
Book Synopsis
Nathan Dragon's The Champ is Here is a loosely-linked collection that follows, with varying distance, an unnamed narrator, his dog, and girlfriend or wife, from small American town to town. He tries on clothes in the mirror, drives by ladders hanging off bridges with his dog, surprises his "baby" with a roadtrip to Brown's Lobster Pound. When a woodpecker disappears from the narrator's yard, the stakes become existential. Even preparing a meal for his love for when she comes home from work can take on evolutionary implications.
Review Quotes
Nathan Dragon has written some of my favorite contemporary American stories.
-Kathryn Scanlan, author of Aug 9 - Fog, The Dominant Animal, Kick the Latch
People staring at themselves like the old man at the gas station stares at the gambling machine. Never losing isn't the same as winning. "The short and long life of a one liner." Nathan's characters in The Champ is Here are trying to be ok with what's already there.
-Jake Lenderman, musician, MJ Lenderman and Wednesday
From a distance, these seem like gentle stories about men who live ordinary lives in quiet towns. But come closer, and you will find anger, jealousy, paranoia, and a longing for beauty so vivid and fierce that it escapes language. Nathan Dragon is the master of the deceptively simple sentence.
-Merve Emre, contributing writer at The New Yorker
I loved The Champ is Here, and found myself reading many of the stories out loud just to hear how the words glow. The stories are like postcards from a town contained within a glacier-far off and so wonderful that you grow wild to get as close as you can.
-Nicolette Polek, author of Imaginary Museums and Bitter Water Opera
Nathan Dragon's miniature worlds of domesticity are sharp and voice-driven, with the compression of Diane Williams and the whimsy of Robert Walser stories. They are full of sublime beauty and longing, wringing your heart and reminding you what it means to be alive.
-Babak Lakghomi, author of Floating Notes and South