Brian Short received his MFA from the University of Michigan, where he received a Hopwood Award and a Zell Post-Graduate Fellowship. His work has appeared inMonday Night and Fourteen Hills. He lives in Ann Arbor, MI.
Brendan Short’s debut novel tells the story of Michael Halligan, a nervous child who, in 1930s Chicago, finds solace in the Sunday adventure comics, where pulp heroes like Dick Tracy and the Shadow bring down the bad guys. As Michael grows up, his obsession with the Big Little Books makes human connection difficult, eventually trapping him inside his collectibles shop.
In her ambitious first novel, Saher Alam uses the conflicted feelings of the groom, Nasr, for Jameela (his long-time friend) and Farath (his beautiful intended) —a triangle conscious of its debt to The Age of Innocence—to paint a nuanced picture of Muslim communities in North America.
In his most recent novel, The Count of Concord, Nicholas Delbanco revives a largely forgotten but fascinating historical figure who was, in his day, an international celebrity: renaissance man Count Rumford (1753-1814). Brian Short asks Delbanco about the story behind bringing this character back, as it were, to life–and the experience of picking up a manuscript again after 20 years.
In his second novel, Zachary Lazar captures the shadow lurking just on the other side of Woodstock; Sway delivers a fresh and haunting take on cultural icons like Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil, and Charles Manson–and on the era they helped characterize.
In Will Allison’s first novel, What You Have Left, the fragmented structure is an appropriate mirror for the Greers, a family torn apart and alternately struggling and refusing to reconstruct itself.
Anton Chekhov is a C-9A Nightingale. Cormac McCarthy is a Focke-Wulf Butcher-Bird with cowboy boot decals. Lorrie Moore is a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. Fun, right?
Divisadero follows three characters through childhood to adolescence on a farm in Northern California’s gold country, a world where the boom is long gone but danger and desperation linger.
