From Powells.com
Our booksellers' favorite books of the year!
Staff Pick
In these vivid drink- and drug-soaked stories of young friends on Cape Cod, Brian S. Ellis’s writing is wry, poetic, highly detailed, and subversively sage. His characters are beautifully particular, their dialogue laugh-out-loud funny. Brian has a jeweler’s eye for finding the fire and flash inside every odd, awkward, and messed-up human trying to play cool in the face of self-doubt. I may have had a way more banal youth than these guys, but I love every sparkly, punk-ass story in this collection. Recommended By Gigi L., Powells.com
The very specific detail of young people in place and time in these stories produces a magic universality. I've never been to Cape Cod, barely been to Massachusetts, but I've been inside these characters' experiences and lives. Language, dry humor, fabulous dialogue — time well spent in Brian Ellis' world. Recommended By Doug C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Review
"The simple, vivid poetry of place and speech and emotion that imbues Brian Ellis's stories about scruffy young people in a listless small town finds its way straight into your heart. You can taste and smell the world of these lost souls, but mostly you can feel it."
Shawn Levy,
best-selling author of The Castle on Sunset and A Year in the Life of Death
Review
"Peopled with boys and men trying to prove that nothing hurts, these stories are about how everything hurts. The cast of unforgettable characters are belly-punching and jumping from cars, they're drinking, and drugging, ever philosophizing and preparing for attacks, mostly to their identity. They're not fucking blood-sucking tourists, but they're always being pushed to the edge anyway. Brian S. Ellis is a genius of intimacy and humor and crying-down tearful grief. He's a phrase-turning page turner and a hardcore poet, too."
Jenny Forrester,
author of Soft Hearted Stories: Seeking Saviors, Cowboy Stylists,and Other Fallacies of Authoritarianism
About the Author
Brian Stephen Ellis is the author of five collections of poetry, Uncontrolled Experiments in Freedom (2008) and Yesterday Won't Goodbye (2011) from Write Bloody Books as well as American Dust Revisited (2013) and Often Go Awry (2015) from University of Hell. With the forthcoming collection Against Common Sense from Limit Zero Press (2023). In addition to the chapbook Pharmakos (2006) from Destructible Heart Press and a collection of short fiction Pretty Much the Last Hardcore Kid in This Town (2023) from Alien Buddha Press. He lives in Portland, Oregon.