
A Thousand Distant Radios
Woody Skinner
(Author)Description
In a debut that has immediately sparked comparisons to the work of earlier masters, Woody Skinner makes his mark as a boldly imaginative new voice. Written with dark humor and folkloric flair, the stories in A Thousand Distant Radios capture the passions and compulsions of modern America in unforgettable imagery and saturated color.
A marlin swims circles in a luminous backyard pool; a small-town surgeon broods from the Olympus of his hilltop house, watched all the while by his neighbors below; a knife salesman plies blades of mythic sharpness while crisscrossing a crazed North American landscape like a mad Paul Bunyan; a young man in rural Arkansas nestles into a satellite dish; and a grandfather's body lies in state amid Annie Oakley's last buffalo kill, General Patton's Persian rug, and countless other oddments of a legendary America.
Skewed, hyperbolical, sometimes surreal, always irresistible, here is fiction honed to cut through the blur of our times. You won't soon forget this book.
Product Details
Publisher | Atelier26 |
Publish Date | November 07, 2017 |
Pages | 200 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9780989302395 |
Dimensions | 8.4 X 5.5 X 0.6 inches | 0.6 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
"Woody Skinner's characters manage to be both wonderfully absurd and absurdly normal. They remind us of our common humanity even as we watch them navigate their impossible, sad and surprising lives. A Thousand Distant Radios is a beautifully strange collection of stories." --Margaret Malone, author, People Like You and PEN/Hemingway Award Finalist
"A Thousand Distant Radios is an extravagantly weird book. Woody Skinner is a singular talent, and I'm glad to have found his stories." --Kyle Minor, author, Praying Drunk
"I love Woody Skinner's deft, ironic writing; he's like a literary country doctor, giving you the bad news so gently you barely notice how much it hurts. Inventive, emotional, and shruggingly comic, these stories give us a 21st-century American South populated by characters - a plumber, a knife salesman, a reluctant catfish farmer - who regret their mistakes while they wait in vain for their real lives to start: people, that is, like you and me." --J. Robert Lennon, author, Familiar
"Skinner's work is reminiscent of other great voice-driven comic writers of the American South: Barry Hannah, Donald Barthelme, Padgett Powell. Like these writers, Skinner, winner of [the] Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize, is funny, sure, but also capable of affecting pathos within the strangest of premises . . . wildly inventive and darkly comic, but always moving." --Memorious Magazine
"Woody Skinner possesses such a mesmerizing gift with language that it's hard not to invoke writers like Barry Hannah and Joy Williams . . . A Thousand Distant Radios announces the arrival of an amazing writer, fully-formed, ready to blow you away." --Kevin Wilson, author, The Family Fang
"Woody Skinner's stories are sly, tragic, violent, beautiful. This is a powerful and disturbing collection, the most gripping work I've read in some time." --Elizabeth McKenzie, author, The Portable Veblen
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