Big Lonesome

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).

Author: Joseph Scapellato
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 02/28/2017
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.25lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.40w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780544769809

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 12/12/2016
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2017

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.