Attention Please Now

St. Louis native Matthew Pitt is the author of two fiction collections: These Are Our Demands (Engine/Ferry Street Books, 2017) and Attention Please Now (Autumn House Press, 2010), winner of the Autumn House Fiction Prize and a Writers’ League of Texas Book Award finalist. His stories and nonfiction have been cited in editions of The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Pushcart Prize anthologies. Among his fellowships and awards include honors from the Mississippi Arts Commission, Bronx Council on the Arts, The New York Times, the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Taos Writers’ Conferences, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

"The central characters of these remarkable stories are oddly ordinary and inordinately odd: that is to say, they are each uniquely qualified to speak for life outside of fiction. Pitt allows them to build the worlds they inhabit from their very particular understandings of what life is, thus endowing their narratives with unpredictable outcomes, and startlingly unexpected revelations along the way. Attention Please Now is a collection possessed of a genuine fictional beauty." —Chuck Wachtel"A remarkable debut by a brilliant young writer." —Brian Morton"The world in these taut, finely wrought stories is and is not the world we know. Pitt pushes his characters to the edge of the possible with a fabulist’s eye for the strange, potent detail and the realist’s sure grasp of human emotion. A piquant, funny, original debut." —Rachel Pastan