Quality Snacks
Stories about the pursuit of all kinds of gratification--from cheap and immoral to expensive and emotionally satisfying.
In a wide range of forms and tones, the fifteen stories in Andy Mozina's new collection, Quality Snacks, center on high-stakes performances by characters trying to gratify both deep and superficial needs, often with unexpected consequences. Driven by strange ambitions, bungled love, and a taste for--or abject fear of--physical danger, the collection's characters enact the paradox in the concept of a quality snack: the dream of transmuting the mundane into something extraordinary.
Two teenage boys play chicken on a Milwaukee freeway. A man experiencing a career crisis watches a seventy-four-year-old great grandmother perform an aerial acrobatics routine at the top of a swaying 110-foot pole. Desperate to find a full-time job, a pizza delivery man is fooled into a humiliating sexual demonstration by a couple at a Midway Motor Lodge. A troubled young man tries to end his father's verbal harassment by successfully hunting a polar bear. After an elf civil war destroys his Christmas operation, Santa Claus reinvents himself as a one-man baseball team and ends up desperate to win a single game. And in the title story, a flavor engineer at Frito-Lay tries to win his boss's heart with a new strategy for Doritos that aims to reposition the brand from snack food to main course.
While some stories embrace pathos and some are humorous and some are realistic and some contain surreal elements, all of the stories in Quality Snacks share striking insight and a cast of compelling, well-conceived characters. This collection, in an earlier form, has been a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award, the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, the Elixir Press Fiction Award, and the Autumn House Fiction Contest, and a semi-finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize. Readers of fiction will be satisfied by the variety of fare offered by Quality Snacks.
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Printers Row recently caught up with Mozina, 52, whose previous books include two short story collections, The
Women Were Leaving the Men (2007) and Quality Snacks (2014), both published by Wayne State University Press.
Mozina's characters come to wry, melancholy insights that don't help them improve their lives, but endear
them to readers. . . Quality Snacks is too funny to call an elegy for the Rust Belt, but Midwesterners will have no problem recognizing the architecture of sagging gutters, decaying strip malls and part-time pizza delivery jobs of the
downwardly mobile, who can't stop scrabbling for a toehold on the debris-strewn slopes of their lives. After
all, as these stories show, things could always get worse.
This collection of 15 unusually well-crafted pieces of short fiction will be savored in its variety of elements - point of view, voice, humor - and Mozina's instinct for the apt phrase. Characters are memorable and touching by their thoughts and actions as well as by their humanity. . . These stories, largely set in the Midwest, will appeal to. . . anyone who appreciates good writing.
--Ellen Loughran "Booklist"Author Andy Mozina's latest collection of fifteen short stories, Quality Snacks, greets readers with a variety of well-written fare, a little something for every palate. These character-driven stories examine topics such as office power dynamics, irrational animal fears, elf genocide at the North Pole, Dorito and porn addiction, nonsexual affairs, and how to be a 'woman of peace.' But this is just a sampling, a taste-testing stroll through the Costco warehouse of Mozina's Quality Snacks. . . Andy Mozina is a talented individual. His newly minted collection of quality shorts leaves readers with plenty of food for thought...
--Mindy M. Jones "Chicago Review Of Books"Mr. Mozina's work is first rate and fans of Carver, Saunders and a certain kind of Marquez-esque fabulist literature will find much to like in this collection.
--Gareth Spark "Fjords Review"
