Kicking In: Stories

(Paperback)

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Narcotic euphoria meets the demands of everyday life in Richard Wirick's brilliant new collection of interlocking stories. Whether depicting a Valium-fogged lawyer representing a car painter who cooked a client in his kiln, or revealing a Gulf War orderly's drift in and out of morphine dreams during an aerial Medevac surgery, Wirick's stories are rich with the social contexts in which sedation's acolytes emerge, come forward to flourish, and then often violently explode or fade away. With a finesse that invigorates and then jars the reader, Wirick maneuvers between narratives of shimmering hallucinations and ecstatic mood-peaks. But Kicking In is not just another drug book. A gut punch to the notion that the drug war stems from society's fringe element, Wirick shines a light on the ways presumably democratic governments use depressants and stimulants to keep selected segments of the population marginalized and disenfranchised. The result is a masterful collection -- a vividly terrifying yet startlingly prosaic consideration of the varieties of drug users' experience with what Coleridge called "the milk of Paradise."

Reviews

Advance Praise for Kicking In "This is what Richard Wirick does: With his acute observational powers, he focuses your attention on detail so finely drawn that you start to believe that anything, from the gruesome to the mundane, when viewed at this scale, can be beautiful. You his relish his sentences so much that it takes a while to realize that they are going to break your heart." --Charles Yu, author of Third Class Superhero "Wirick's stories are powerful, evocative tales rife with dark beauty. His characters, whether at work or at war, or just making it on the jagged margins of society, jump off the page and into your head and stay there long after you put this book aside. This is high-octane stuff, and a rare beast in today's fiction--work that is well crafted yet full of heart. These are the kind of stories you will find yourself going back to over the years." --Thomas Kelly, author of Empire Rising "A book of distilled, brutal beauty, written with cold-eyed fierceness." --Nick Flynn "Fair warning, citizens: Rick Wirick refuses to play nice. His is an imagined real world where the gloves are off, the body armor essential, and the prose locked and loaded. Here, love doesn't occasion transcendence. Not even close. Family, faith, friendship--all are but grist for the Great Doodah specializing in woe and cross-heartedness. Kicking In imperils your vital lies, your wishful thinking, and your willful self-delusion. Cover your ya-yas, people. You'll need 'em in the next life." --Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once "Some of Wirick's characters find themselves, as one puts it, in 'the kind of place where people only end up.' Wirick captures the hapless, the trapped, the desperate watchers in this world. Each story accrues power as it reveals knife-sharp truths about ourselves: our guilt, responsibility, and self-justification. And though one narrator speaks of 'little points of desperation,' these stories are absorbing, suspenseful and delightful in their precision--carefully crafted and a pleasure to read and re-read." --S.L. Wisenberg, Nonfiction Editor, Another Chicago Magazine Praise for One Hundred Siberian Postcards "Entrancing ... Each snow-bright 'postcard' catches a facet of Siberian myth, history or wildlife ... [Wirick] digs up gem after glittering gem." --The Independent "[Wirick] has a mystic's confidence in the power of his imagination to pry bits of truth out of the frigid landscape ... compassionate and literate." --The New Statesman "Richard Wirick has it down to a fine art ... 100 perfect postcards ... Each contains a precious insight into an alien land." --The Times (London) "A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed." --Hugo Williams, author of Dear Room "Richard Wirick is an insurance lawyer with the soul--and the pen--of a poet." --Anna Reid, author of Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine "Wirick's profoundly moving book is unlike anything else I've read; an ode to Siberia as much as it is to the human condition." --Samantha Gillison, author of The King of America

Author Bio

Richard Wirick is co-founder and editor of the journal Transformation. His work has appeared in Playboy, Quarterly West, LA Weekly and elsewhere. His earlier books include One Hundred Siberian Postcards, literary vignettes of his journey to Siberia to adopt a baby girl with his wife, and a book of interconnected stories, Kicking In. He practices law in Los Angeles, where he lives with his family.