Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

SHADOWSELVES

Jason Ockert

Speculative and darkly surreal, the stories in SHADOWSELVES examine characters who have stepped dangerously close to an edge they cannot see.

A snowplow driver stranded on the roadside during a blizzard finds himself trapped in a riddled memory. A middle-aged man wakes up one morning to find he's gained four hundred pounds overnight, along with the unbearable regrets of countless strangers. A lonely child sets off to prove the existence of a mythic bird, but uncovers an ugly secret on the other side of town. A comatose teenage outcast traverses the liminal space between life and death. With a sometimes-tenuous grip on reality, and often haunted by mistakes, repressions, and alternate versions of who they might have been, the characters in SHADOWSELVES struggle to find meaningful human connections in a world where the most important things always seem just out of their reach. Jason Ockert is the author of Wasp Box, a novel, and three collections of short stories: Shadowselves, Neighbors of Nothing, and Rabbit Punches. Winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, the Atlantic Monthly Fiction Contest, and the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, he was also a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Million Writers Award. His work has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Granta, The Cincinnati Review, Oxford American, One Story, and McSweeney's. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University and lives in South Carolina.

Available products
Book Published 2022-02-22 by Dzanc Books

Comments

The writing is hip but not terminally hip, fun, at times very fun, and contains signs that the author is disturbed enough to be worth watching. He may tell us some new things.

Ockert's stories make me feel grateful to have eyeballs. His plots are hair- raisingly original, his humor is feverish and dark, his language soars. And yet no matter what altitude of weird Ockert achieves here, his imaginary worlds are always populated by real people, characters who matter deeply to each other, and to their readers.

Jason Ockert digs deep in these stories and unearths some difficult truths. This is a writer working with a high degree of difficulty and he nails it.

Parents and children, students and teachers, artists, lovers, and shut-ins, these characters live on the outskirts. They are the ones who don't belong - but that does not stop them from discovering ways to soldier on, unearthing hope and even a place to call home in Ockert's mysterious, wild, and wonderful world.

Devotees of Steven Millhauser, Karen Russell, Kevin Brockmeier, and George Saunders might be choosing a new favorite writer after devouring Jason Ockert's SHADOWSELVES. This collection offers nothing but off-center, believable characters lodged in off-center, though believable, situations. Throw Barthelme in there, too and - perhaps oddly - Carver. What an astounding accomplishment.

Jason Ockert would be worth reading for the luminescence of his prose alone, but the stories in SHADOWSELVES are just as marvelous. In form and content, they constantly subvert our expectations, but somehow always lead us into the endless complexities of the human heart.

There are writers who are experts at perfecting the well-known story, and writers who strike out on their own, who innovate the form. What's remarkable about Ockert is that he is one of the few writers who manages simultaneously to do both: these are beautifully crafted and necessary stories that nevertheless take real narrative risks. They are surprising and alarming, but also deeply familiar and satisfying.

Ockert delights with his latest, a collection full of quirky and original characters who inhabit a gothic landscape in Florida, 'the kickstand of the country.'... Ockert is a natural heir to the grotesquery of Flannery O'Connor with his interest in misfits and his dark, powerful language. The author deserves a wider audience for his risk-taking and wonderfully realized voice.

Ockert's voice is quirky, funny, and totally original - it conveys, in these dreamlike, virtuosic stories, a strange and vulnerable kindness you haven't read before.