About this item
This engrossing first story collection by rising star Brendan Mathews is packed with compelling tales such as "My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer," in which a love triangle complicates things between a lion tamer, a trapeze artist, and the strongman. Mathews effortlessly weaves irresistible stories from a wide array of situations, as in "Airborne," in which a couple's obsession with a mold in their house causes them to tear it apart plank by plank. A worker in architectural salvage trying to two-time his boss by stealing a valuable antique, a father and his sons haggling over the family business during high-stakes rounds of golf, and a widow of the Bosnian conflict recalling her husband's demise and her dramatic escape are only a few of the warm and intimately revealed characters populating Mathews's enchanting collection.
About the Author
Brendan Mathews is the author of The World of Tomorrow (Little, Brown & Co.) , one of Entertainment Weekly's "20 Must Read Fall Books." His fiction has twice appeared in The Best American Short Stories and in Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, Cincinnati Review, and other publications in the US and UK. He was a Fulbright Scholar to Ireland and has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Sewanee Writers Conference. Born and raised in upstate New York, he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received his MFA from the University of Virginia. He lives with his wife and their four children in Lenox, Massachusetts, and teaches at Bard College at Simon's Rock.
