You're in the Wrong Place

<p>In a thrilling interconnected narrative <i>You're in the Wrong Place</i> presents characters reaching for transcendence from a place they cannot escape. Charles Baxter stated that Joseph Harris has a particular feeling for the Detroit suburbs and the slightly stunted lives of the young people there. . . . <i>You're in the Wrong Place</i> isn't uniformly downbeat-there are all sorts of rays of hope that gleam toward the end. <p/>The book composed of twelve stories begins in the fall of 2008 with the shuttering of Dynamic Fabricating-a fictional industrial shop located in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale. Over the next seven years the shop's former employees-as well as their friends and families-struggle to find money purpose and levity in a landscape suddenly devoid of work faith and love. In Would You Rather a young couple brought together by Dynamic Fabricating shares a blissful weekend in Northern Michigan unaware of the catastrophe that awaits them upon their return home. In Acolytes a devout Catholic clings to her faith as her brothers descend into cultish soccer violence. In Memorial an ex-Dynamic worker scrapes money together for a tribute to his best friend lost to the war in Afghanistan. In Was It Good for You? a cam girl deconstructs materialism with her aging great aunt a luxury sales associate and an anxious faceless client. And in the title story simmering tensions come to a boil on a hot summer day for a hardscrabble landscaping crew hired by the local bank to maintain the lawns of foreclosures.<br>In turns elegiac and harrowing <i>You're in the Wrong Place </i>blends lyric intensity with philosophical eroticism to create a singular powerful vision of contemporary American life. Readers of contemporary fiction grounded in place need to take up this collection.</p>