Description: Featuring seven stories and a novella, Crouse's powerful debut collection depicts people staring down the complicated mysteries of their own identities. His characters are unwilling and often unable to differentiate reality from fantasy. Cursed with what one of them calls "a pollution of ideas," they at war with their own imaginations.
Brief description: DAVID CROUSE is the author of Copy Cats, which received the 2004 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and The Man Back There, which received the Mary McCarthy Fiction Prize in 2008. His new collection of novellas is Trouble Will Save You (2021). David is full professor of English at the University of Washington and also serves as the Director of the MFA Program. David's stories have appeared in such publications as the Massachusetts Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Chelsea, and Quarterly West.
Review Quotes:
Crouse's voice has a cool, measured urgency to it that invites his readers not to miss the most delicate flickers of language as he describes his characters' often confused or detached states of mind. The people in his stories might be out of work or hold jobs at copy shops, but they are alive to the possibility that choice--to act or even to stay still--is always present. Watching them as they make those decisions provides subtle suspense as the collection unfolds. Lucidly written, darkly funny, these stories possess a crystalline acuity. An elegant debut.
--Charlotte Bacon "author of There Is Room for You"