About the Author

STEVEN SCHWARTZ grew up outside Chester, Pennsylvania, and has lived in Colorado for the past 30 years. He's the author of the novels Therapy and A Good Doctor's Son and three collections of short stories, including most recently Little Raw Souls, winner of the 2014 Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction. His writing has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Cohen Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two O. Henry Prize Story Awards, and the Cleanth Brooks Prize in Nonfiction. Professor Emeritus of English at Colorado State University, he is fiction editor for Colorado Review. His new book, Madagascar: New and Selected Stories, will be published in September 2016. http://www.stevenschwartzbooks.com/

Reviews

Schwartz appreciates that a compelling plotline can contribute intensity to the brief life of a short story. All of these 11 stories arrest the reader from their opening paragraphs...But Schwartz is careful to use his strong, even page-turning plots to service the short story form s primary responsibility: to capture a character s most salient traits. His easy, unpretentious writing style not only adds to the stories accessibility and resonance but also supplies the solid amalgam between plot and character, resulting in a collection to be held up as evidence that the short story not only endures but also flourishes. Brad Hooper, Booklist"