Here is What You Do

Chris Dennis

ISBN: 9781641290364

Published: June 2019

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Paperback $16.00

eBook $9.99

Chris Dennis

Southern Illinois

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Description

A debut short story collection that explores the vulnerability, grit, and complex nature of our humanity from a new, vital queer voice.

Read a note from editor Mark Doten.

A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jaile...

A debut short story collection that explores the vulnerability, grit, and complex nature of our humanity from a new, vital queer voice.

Read a note from editor Mark Doten.

A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jailed on a drug charge forms a relationship with his cellmate that is by turns tender and brutal. A family buys a rural slaughterhouse, and tensions with their religious neighbors quickly escalate. A teen raised by his eccentric gay father, a Turkish immigrant, finds his life fractured by violence. A fictionalized Coretta Scott King, surveilled and harassed by the FBI, considers the costs of her life with her husband.

Here Is What You Do is a bravura, far-ranging collection, its stories linked by sorrow and latent hope, each one drilling toward its characters’ darkest emotional centers. In muscularly robust prose, with an unfailing eye for human drives and frailties, Chris Dennis captures the raw need, desire, cruelty, and promise that animate our lives.

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“In weathered prose and rusted experience that echo, humbly, the final stories of Denis Johnson, Here is What You Do offers its readers a painful gift: it’s always through love and the never-ending wish for it that we allow our bodies and selves to be policed, sometimes beyond repair. These stories will never leave you. ”
–Patrick Nathan, author of Some Hell
“Unquestionably artful.”
—Booklist