Nick Bascom was born in Kansas but grew up in Cincinnati. After a brief stint as a science writer, he entered the MFA program at Penn State University where he has been hard at work completing a collection of stories, The Lion with No Tongue and Other Tales, as well as a semi-autobiographical novel titled Take Me Back, Cincinnati. He looks to many authors for inspiration, but Dylan Thomas’sPortrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, George Saunders’s In Persuasion Nation, and Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree are the works he returns to most frequently to reinvigorate a tired pen.
Tim Z. Hernandez’s Breathing, In Dust rips along like one of the trains whose wheels sing Catela, Catela, Catela, Catela as they churn through the San Juaquin valley. In twenty linked, ferociously compact short stories and a lyrical prologue, Hernandez sings of Catela too, triumphantly bringing this fictional farming community to life.
