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Becky Mandelbaum

The eleven stories in this Flannery O’Connor Award-winning collection explore Midwestern life “with heart and precision, and a fresh sense of humor” (Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted).
 
 These beautifully crafted stories reveal the complicated underbelly of the country’s most flown-over state and the quirky characters that call it home. In this darkly humorous collection, Kansas becomes a state of mind as Mandelbaum’s characters struggle to define their relationship to home and what it means to stay or leave, to hold on or let go.
 
 When a desperately lonely woman finds herself on a bad date with a rugged man, she must decide whether to sacrifice the life of a bear in order to keep the man’s affection. After having a nightmare about a mallard, a young man wakes to discover he’s choking the woman he loves. When his mother starts dating a slimy pizza parlor owner, a young boy must carefully consider his loyalties. The appealing and peculiar characters in Bad Kansas are determined to get what they want, be it love or sex or power, in a world determined to overlook them.

University of Georgia Press

Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction Series

Bad Kansas: Stories

Amina Gautier

“Gautier writes with exhilarating insight and confidence about the lives of teenagers . . . at risk from themselves, their families and their friends.”—Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author
 
 In Amina Gautier’s Brooklyn, some kids make it and some kids don’t, but not in simple ways or for stereotypical reasons. Gautier’s stories explore the lives of young African Americans who might all be classified as “at-risk,” yet who encounter different opportunities and dangers in their particular neighborhoods and schools and who see life through the lens of different family experiences.
 
 Gautier’s focus is on quiet daily moments, even in extraordinary lives; her characters do not stand as emblems of a subculture but live and breathe as people. In “The Ease of Living,” the young teen Jason is sent down south to spend the summer with his grandfather after witnessing the double murder of his two best friends, and he is not happy about it. In “Pan Is Dead,” two half-siblings watch as the heroin-addicted father of the older one works his way back into their mother’s life; in “Dance for Me,” a girl on scholarship at a posh Manhattan school teaches white girls to dance in the bathroom in order to be invited to a party.
 
 As teenagers in complicated circumstances, each of Gautier’s characters is pushed in many directions. To succeed may entail unforgiveable compro­mises, and to follow their desires may lead to catastrophe. Yet within these stories they exist and can be seen as they are, in the moment of choosing.
 
 “Despite its title, this is not a debut composed of rapid shocks and dangers, but a quieter accumulation of heartbreaking pressures.”—Foreword Reviews

At-Risk: Stories

Ha Jin

“The spirit of a rural town during China's Cultural Revolution is captured” in this Flannery O’Connor Award-winning short story collection (Publishers Weekly).
 
 The acclaimed poet Ha Jin was raised in China and emigrated to the United States after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In Under the Red Flag, he writes about loss and moral deterioration with the keen sense of a survivor. His stories examine life in the bleak rural town of Dismount Fort, where privacy is nonexistent and paranoia rules as neighbor turns against neighbor, husband turns against wife, state turns against individual, history turns against humanity. 

 In "A Man-to-Be," an engaged militiaman participates in a gang rape, but finds himself impotent when he looks into the eyes of the victim. His fiancee's family breaks off the engagement, not because of the rape, but because they doubt his virility. In "Winds and Clouds over a Funeral," a Communist leader disobeys his mother's last wish for burial to keep his good standing in the party, but his enemies bring him down for being a bad son. "In Broad Daylight" is the story of the public humiliation of a woman accused of being a whore. Her dignified defiance is gradually stripped away as she is dragged through the streets, cursed and spat upon by strangers and family alike.

Under the Red Flag: Stories