Everyone Here Has a Gun: Stories (Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction) - Hardcover

Lucas Southworth in his deep-dish, deadpan debut collection, Everyone Here Has a Gun, turns us on to a spinning world where something is always off. Oh, it all seems normal enough and quite matter-of-fact at the start. But then the stories turn and turn -- twisted, worsted -- the matter, in fact, gone dark and all anti-. Watch it and watch out! Of course the characters are weaponized along with the shape-charged plotting and the brilliant tracing rounds of language, illuminating the negative capability of suddenly stunning up-armored porcelain prose.--Michael Martone, author of Four for a Quarter Everyone Here Has a Gun took me on a roller coaster ride that I'd never been on before.... Every piece is strikingly different, and yet there's also a cohesion to the collection that plunged me deeply into this writer's alien yet weirdly familiar world, as if I'd been dreaming someone else's dream. There are images and moments in each of these stories that have lodged into my brain like shrapnel. A truly unique and memorable reading experience.--Dan Chaon, Grace Paley Prize judge and author of Stay Awake and Await Your Reply

In a tightrope act of darkness and humor, fantasy and reality, the twelve stories in this award-winning collection describe characters searching for comfort and stability in a world that is ultimately too vast, violent, and incomprehensible. As they revert to what seems most simple and familiar public transportation, television, museums, fairy tales they discover only murder, displacement, fragmentation, and obsession. In "The Running Legs and Other Stories", Mary Beth attempts to recall a traumatic experience from her childhood, filtering it through children s stories told by her wicked stepmother. In "Lincoln's Face, A Resurrection", an African American make-up artist struggles with concepts of history as she transforms a former lover into Abraham Lincoln. The young narrator in "Under the World" grieves for his parents by losing himself in a worldwide subway system. And in the title story, the speaker describes a small room where everyone armed with a single gun waits with dread and anticipation for the inevitable first shot. Anton Chekhov famously noted that if a story introduces a gun in the first act, that gun must go off by the third. Yet while weapons are often present in Southworth's stories, they are rarely fired, existing instead as a constant reminder of the power people can have over each other and the violent potential of narrative itself.