The Old Priest

Back Cover

FICTION/SHORT STORIES “along with a title story that has the scale and scope of a novel, these stories feature people who ‘struggle every day with good and evil.’ Whether it’s a digressive story of family dissolution with a touch of the magical or a casino worker’s evocative drive home along the Jersey Shore, the author is finely attuned to those defining moments when hope and giving up become difficult to distinguish. the stories are always provocative; they overturn our expectations, and the characters’ lack of self-pity is just one source of their power. the prose is often powered by yearning and takes us through recklessness and defiance to deliver a benediction where we would not expect to find one.” —AMY HEMPEL “The Old Priest is a wonderfully nuanced collection, whose stories are well grounded and vibrant with lively characters and revealing details. a splendid debut.” —HA JIN “this writer’s ‘beat’ is mostly southern new Jersey—with a few side trips to las Vegas—and he knows the tawdry casinos, sex clubs, and trailers not from the vantage of tourists but from the people who live and work there. the acid voices that tell these stories of losers and self-deluders are cut a tiny bit by the sugar of pity, but never by self-pity. there’s a stern moral force behind the gaze of this writer, who sees and tells and does not look away.” —APRIL BERNARD University of Pittsburgh Press www.upress.pitt.edu Jacket design & illustration: Bruce Gore | Gore Studio, inc. iSBn 13: 978-0-8229-4429-4 iSBn 10: 0-8229-4429-4 ...