"The characters populating these stories have been enduring time and weather and hardship for a long time. People and forces they can't control cut them down. Wives leave them. Friends betray them. Fathers refuse to understand them. But these people have a refreshing, ecological knowledge that there is always something to be done to make your own world complete again, at least for a minute. Even if it is eating a big bowl of your neighbor's Rocky Road and finding a good but dumb-as-hell movie on the man's TV to take your mind off the crap hand you've been dealt."
- Maria Anderson, Necessary Fiction

"In modest homes, over dinners, through divorces and the decades, we meet brothers, neighbors, daughters, soldiers, old friends and longtime rivals. From one story to another, through the years, these every day people may be villains and then victims, painted with the same brush but viewed from different angles, in different light."
- Brian Juenemann, The Register-Guard

"... the most skillfully-woven collection of linked short stories I've read to date."
- Stefanie Freele, Late Night Library

"Stevan Allred's stories strike to the very heart--the pathos, the humor, the hope--of the American frontier. He is OUT there. Raymond Carver would love this book."
- Robin Cody, author of Ricochet River

"Acts of neighborly kindness rub elbows with acts of raw prejudice. A rejected son learns complicated grief after the death of his father. The stunt of two brothers, an unexpected variation on boys will be boys, brings laughter in one story, then recurs in a tragic later story in a moment of magical realism. Allred offers a dazzling variation in storyteller voices, each revealing how often we hide our desires from ourselves and each other."
- Helen Sinoradzki, naming it a #1 book of 2013 in the Powell's Top 5s lists

"What a joy it is when an author's imagination is on par with his writing chops. The richly nuanced town of Renata, Oregon, becomes palpably real in A Simplified Map of the Real World, Stevan Allred's charming tapestry of life, death, love, heartache and every other human experience captured and fully realized in a series of interconnected short stories. Each snapshot of present and past life in the fictional northwestern logging town adds new layers to its cast and their complex histories with each other, quietly emphasizing the strange fact that no matter how well or how long we think know someone, we'll never truly know what inner mysteries (and occasional deluded justifications) propel them along the paths they choose."
- Madeleine Maccar, Chicago's Center for Literature & Photography

"Death and high jinks, love and rage--the ordinary doings of a small town are not so simple. Stevan Allred has clear vision and he's a loving and joyful teller of tales. In his hands, these voices are angry, foolish, wise, heartbroken, and true."
- Joanna Rose, author of Little Miss Strange

"Much like being ambushed by a sneaker wave, I simply surrendered to the futile and claustrophobic circumstances Allred forces the community of Renata to endure in this linked collection. As human beings we all know there are two sides--or multiple ones--to every story, and as readers, it's pure indulgence to experience Allred's deft ability to shift between various points of view to give us a 360-degree perspective of the intertwining lives of his characters as they meet head-on their spectrum of woes, each more heartbreaking than the last."
- Polly Dugan, author of So Much a Part of You

"Allred writes wonderfully of loneliness, despair, and desire. The history and characters contained within the town of Renata, Oregon make this one of the most connected collection of short