Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

SWEET NOTHING

Richard Lange

SWEET NOTHING features ten gritty stories written in razor-sharp language and with the deftness of a master of the form. In these gripping and intense stories, Richard Lange returns to the form that first landed him on the literary map.

All set on the dark side of Los Angeles, these are edge-of-your-seat tales: A prison guard must protect an inmate being tried for heinous crimes. A father and son set out to rescue a young couple trapped during a wildfire. An ex-con trying to make good as a security guard stumbles onto a burglary plot. A young father must submit to blackmail to protect the fragile life he's built. Lange portrays men and women trying to outrun their demons or turning to square off against them. In doing so, he captures those crystalline moments when one decision becomes the axis on which a whole life turns.

TC Boyle has said "Lange's stories combine the truth-telling and immediacy of Raymond Carver with the casual hip of Denis Johnson. There is a potent artistic sensibility at work here." In these gripping and intense stories, Richard Lange returns to the form that first landed him on the literary map. Lange’s debut collection, Dead Boys, was hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “one of the best short story collections of the past fifty years.”

Richard Lange is the author of the story collection Dead Boys, and the novels This Wicked World and Angel Baby. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2004 and 2011. He lives in Los Angeles.

Available products
Book Published 2015-02-15 by Mulholland/Little Brown
Book Published 2015-02-15 by Mulholland/Little Brown

Comments

I've been reading Richard Lange's work since Dead Boys blew my doors off years ago, and goddamn, the man just keeps getting better. The stories in Sweet Nothing traffic in the vagaries of the human heart, those wants and needs that push us down dark paths. His vision is steely-eyed, yet you sense that Lange loves his characters-even the worst of them-and that compassion sharpens your own emotional investment in this powerful brace of stories.

What makes this collection a wonderful read is that it's only marginally akin to anything else. Swift, gut-wrenching, and sometimes cleverly disarming fiction by a master.

Skillfully constructed . . . Lange portrays the lives of people struggling to survive, with the focus on families, both blood-related and chance-made."—Ellen Loughran

Richard Lange's stories are a revelation. He writes of the disaffections and bewilderments of ordinary lives with as keen an anger and searing lyricism as anybody out there today. He is Raymond Carver reborn in a hard cityscape. Read him and be amazed.

For me the best stories are rabbit holes. You read the first lines, maybe a page, and you're down there. Somewhere else. Another life. Richard Lange is one cwazy wabbit.

For all the darkness that runs through the stories, Lange maintains a disarmingly light touch. . . . These tales are not far removed from the classic stories of O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant.