Big Lonesome - Paperback

by Joseph Scapellato (Author)

An inventive, ranging debut story collection from a writer hailed by Claire Vaye Watkins as "Wallace Stegner on peyote, Nathanael West in a sweat lodge, Larry McMurtry on a vision quest."

Reinventing a great American tradition through an absurdist, discerning eye, Joseph Scapellato uses these twenty-five stories to conjure worlds, themes, and characters who are at once unquestionably familiar and undeniably strange. Big Lonesome navigates through the American West--from the Old West to the modern-day West to the Midwest, from cowboys to mythical creatures to everything in between--exploring place, myth, masculinity, and what it means to be whole or to be broken. Though he works in the tradition of George Saunders and Patrick deWitt--writing subversive, surreal, and affecting stories that unveil the surprising inner lives of ordinary people and the mythic dimensions of our everyday lives--"Scapellato's Big Lonesome is unlike anything else you've ever read" (Robert Boswell).

Author Biography

JOSEPH SCAPELLATO's fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review online, Gulf Coast, Post Road, and other journals, and has been anthologized in Forty Stories, Gigantic Worlds: An Anthology of Science Flash Fiction, and The Best Innovative Writing. He teaches at Bucknell University. Big Lonesome is his first book.