Description:
A TIME, The New Yorker, ELLE, NPR, Harper's Bazaar Best Book of the Year
Winner of the 2025 Housatonic Book Award
Finalist 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the 2024 Maya Angelou Book Award
Shortlisted for the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award
Longlisted for the 2025 VCU Cabell First Novel Award, 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
"Utterly consuming. . . . Fire Exit absolutely smolders."--Tommy Orange
From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, comes a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another.
Brief description: Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation. His debut short story collection, Night of the Living Rez, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the New England Book Award, the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Honor, and was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and The Story Prize. His writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Granta, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Talty is an assistant professor of English in Creative Writing and Native American and Contemporary Literature at the University of Maine, Orono, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing as well as the Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Levant, Maine.
Review Quotes: A tender and unwavering look at the experience of a community that attempts to grapple with its painful past--and its future.-- "TIME, a Best Book of the Year"