Big Lonesome

<p><strong>An inventive ranging debut story collection from a writer hailed by Claire Vaye Watkins as "Wallace Stegner on peyote Nathanael West in a sweat lodge Larry McMurtry on a vision quest."</strong><br /><br />Reinventing a great American tradition through an absurdist discerning eye Joseph Scapellato uses these twenty-five stories to conjure worlds themes and characters who are at once unquestionably familiar and undeniably strange. <em>Big Lonesome</em> navigates through the American West--from the Old West to the modern-day West to the Midwest from cowboys to mythical creatures to everything in between--exploring place myth masculinity and what it means to be whole or to be broken. Though he works in the tradition of George Saunders and Patrick deWitt--writing subversive surreal and affecting stories that unveil the surprising inner lives of ordinary people and the mythic dimensions of our everyday lives--"Scapellato's <em>Big Lonesome </em>is unlike anything else you've ever read" (Robert Boswell).</p>