Wrench and Other Stories

"Wrench proves that Wayne Harrison knows what it takes to keep cars and stories running smoothly. He also understands the working of the human heart, and the result is a collection filled with stories that are authentic and compelling." - LARRY WATSON New American Fiction Prize Final Judge and author of As Good as Gone and Let Him Go "Wayne Harrison is the real deal. His irresistible blue-collar stories come straight at you, and you don't question a word. They barrel forward with so much truth and candor they intertwine with your own memories. This is one of the best collections I've read in a while." - JIM LYNCH Author of Before the Wind and Truth Like the Sun "Like Carver, Harrison has a gift for evoking working-class lives in all their disorientation, threat, and quietness. And like the later Carver, his focus is on generosity, on moments when lives intersect and expand. Tragedy here isn't meanness but can be the ache of wanting to help someone and having to watch them destroy themselves anyway. These stories are elegant and powerful and ultimately about our resilience." - DAVID VANN Author of Goat Mountain and Aquarium PRAISE FOR WAYNE HARRISON'S DEBUT NOVEL, THE SPARK AND THE DRIVE "There's nothing I enjoy more than entering a fictional world over which an author demonstrates complete mastery. That's exactly what Wayne Harrison offers his lucky readers in The Spark and the Drive." - Richard Russo "A piercing and stylish debut." - Maggie Shipstead "Wayne Harrison is an exciting new voice in American fiction." - Ron Rash "Young men will always idolize the father substitutes who promise them a way out of the familiar. Ever volatile, such relationships fuel some of our best literature, and to this category we must now add Wayne Harrison's gorgeous and grittily poetic debut novel." - Ann Packer "The Spark and the Drive is as intense and well-written a love story as you'll find." - Peter Orner "Wayne Harrison is an extremely gifted writer....This novel is as expertly built and fine-tuned as the engines he writes about." - Jill McCorkle. "[Harrison] knows the human heart, and in these pages he's managed a rare feat: to write a novel that's as moving as it is suspenseful, as tender as it is tough." - Steve Yarbrough "Is anything more exciting than a novel that is so polished, so moving and exciting, that you swear it can't be a debut?...[T]he genius of this extraordinary novel is that it shows us those possibilities, and it makes us ache and grieve for them, too." - The San Francisco Chronicle "A terrifically engaging story... Like Richard Russo, Philipp Meyer and Mark Slouka, Harrison understands the rusting body of American labor. Whether or not you love cars, Harrison speaks that special dialect so fluently that anyone with a heart can hear it." - The Washington Post "Harrison's characters are fully fleshed, and his prose masterfully polished, making for a thoroughly engrossing read and a strikingly original debut novel." - Booklist "An intense, passionate tale of love and loss, this is a book with the makings of an American classic. Harrison takes readers on an unforgettable ride." - Book Page