Tacoma Stories

Richard Wiley is one of our best writers. These stories satisfy in the way that brilliant short fiction always satisfies; one feels as if one has absorbed the expansive vision and drama of a novel. Read slowly, and I bet youll want to read again. Richard Bausch, author of Peace and Living in the Weather of the World Its a strange and winsome feeling I have, reading Tacoma Stories, the blue sensation that Richard Wiley has made me homesick for a place Ive never been, mourning the loss of friends I never had, in a life where each and every one of us is loved, however imperfectly. Think Sherwood Anderson inhabiting Raymond Carvers Northwest and youll have a clear picture of Wileys accomplishment. Bob Shacochis, author of Easy in the Islands and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul On St. Patricks Day in 1968, sixteen people sit in Pats Tavern, drink green beer, flirt, rib each other, and eventually go home in (mostly) different directions. In the stories that follow, which span 1958 to the present, Richard Wiley pops back into the lives of this colorful cast of characterssometimes into their pasts, sometimes into their futuresand explores the ways in which their individual narratives indelibly weave together. At the heart of it all lies Tacoma, Washington, a town full of eccentricities and citizens as unique as they are universal. The Tacoma of Tacoma Stories might be harboring paranoid former CIA operatives and wax replicas of dead husbands, but it is also a place with all the joys and pains one could find in any town, anytime and anywhere. Richard Wiley is the author of eight novels including Bob Stevenson; Soldiers in Hiding, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Washington State Book Award; and Ahmeds Revenge, winner of the Maria Thomas Fiction Award. Professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he divides his time between Los Angeles, California, and Tacoma, Washington.