Praying Drunk: Stories, Questions
"I finished this book with my heart pounding and grateful, my coffee cold and my smile wide and crying like a baby."--Daniel Handler
The characters in Praying Drunk speak in tongues, torture their classmates, fall in love, hunt for immortality, abandon their children, keep machetes beneath passenger seats, and collect porcelain figurines. A man crushes pills on the bathroom counter while his son watches from the hallway; missionaries clumsily navigate an uprising with barbed wire and broken glass; a boy disparages memorized scripture, facedown on the asphalt, as he fails to fend off his bully. From Kentucky to Florida to Haiti, these seemingly disparate lives are woven together within a series of nested repetitions, enacting the struggle to remain physically and spiritually alive throughout the untamable turbulence of their worlds. In a masterful blend of fiction, autobiography, and surrealism, Kyle Minor shows us that the space between fearlessness and terror is often very small. Long before Praying Drunk reaches its plaintive, pitch-perfect end, Minor establishes himself again and again as one of the most talented younger writers in America.
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--New York Times Book Review "An award-winning short fiction author offers twelve stories so ripe with realism as to suggest a roman à clef. . . . This brilliant collection unfolds around a fractured narrative of faith and friends and family, loved and lost."
--Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review "The collection's masterpiece, the novella "In a Distant Country," works in epistolary style through a wide array of correspondents. All are connected somehow to a troubled Baptist mission in Haiti, and their community portrait, thanks to Minor's ventriloquism, achieves tragic stature. . . . [a] grim yet terrific collection."
--Boston Globe "Minor's book is one of the most thought-provoking, intelligently designed story collections I've seen in some time, and the discussions he starts--about life, about art, about the boundaries and limitations of genre--are ones scholars and writers alike will be discussing for quite some time, and with good reason. Equally impressively, the narratives are engaging and the sentences strikingly arranged."
--Barnes & Noble Reviews "As a jealous and deeply insecure writer, I wish I didn't have to report that these stories are enviably brilliant. But sadly, this is the fact of the matter. Kyle Minor has elevated the short story collection for me."
--LA Review of Books "Kyle Minor's new collection, Praying Drunk, has already made its claim for being one of the year's best books. The stories contained within it recount wrenching stories of families in turmoil, faith challenged, and nations in upheaval. Structurally inventive and equally adept at realism and the surreal, Minor's new book is a stunning work of literature."
--Vol. 1 Brooklyn "Praying Drunk gets the whole thing down: the cosmic muck and the local glory, the big questions and the tiny lives, the bullies and the saviors, the screaming at the sky and the lights by the side of the road late at night on a long drive. I finished this book with my heart pounding and grateful, my coffee cold and my smile wide and crying like a baby."
--Daniel Handler "Watch Praying Drunk's lovely, lonely people wrestle with Minor's dark God and remember when you too tried to reason with Him and unravel His mysterious commands. These passionate tales, full of longing and daring and honesty, will disturb and inspire you."
--Deb Olin Unferth "When the characters residing in Kyle Minor's engrossing and lively Praying Drunk find a toehold on the good life, I hope that it's autobiographical. When the characters find themselves enveloped in desperate situations, irreversible circumstances, and despair, I pray that it's solely out of the writer's imagination. These fine stories-up there with the best works of Padgett Powell, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover-never straddle a milquetoast fence: they're extreme in humor, extreme in sorrowfulness, and 100% individually-wrapped masterpieces. I am haunted and mesmerized by this collection."
--George Singleton, author of Stray Decorum
