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).