Truth Poker

Mark Brazaitis is the author of six books of fiction, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and a book of poems, The Other Language, which won the 2008 ABZ Poetry Prize. His writing has been featured on The Diane Rehm Show as well as on public radio in Cleveland, Iowa City, New York City, and Pittsburgh. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, Brazaitis is a professor of English and directs the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop at West Virginia University.

Phantom girls appearing on dark, lonely highways, Guatemalan cops with hand-painted playing cards brokered as bribes, a man who fixes people’s eyes without the benefit of a medical degree–these strange events set off the Rube Goldberg-like plot lines in Mark Brazaitis’ new collection of short stories. The dominoes are falling–one after another–and the characters, guided by guilt, confusion, and mistakes, can’t stop their worlds from tumbling down around them. These innovative stories capture characters doing exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment. Exquisite! —Sharon Dilworth