The Gunman and The Carnival: Stories

(Paperback)

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Timely and introspective, Catherine Gammons The Gunman and the Carnival is the meeting of contemporary voices and visions that offer not relatability, but an intimate encounter open to strangeness and its embrace. The stories in the inimitable Catherine Gammons The Gunman and the Carnivalloosely linked and set in Los Angeles, Californiacenter on women of various ages and backgrounds. Constructed around themes of solitude and connection, creation and destruction, love and loss, the sixteen stories unfold in a world haunted by individual and collective violence, systemic injustice, pandemic, and environmental duress: not with genre sensibilities of the dystopic or apocalyptic, but contained in the everyday reality of now. The Gunman and the Carnival does not aspire to be a panorama or to portray the city (or the nation) in its extraordinary complexity. Rather it shines a roving light into the minds and hearts of an idiosyncratic handful of characters living in our difficult times and invites each one to sing. Some of the stories are realist, some oblique and fragmented, others metafictional or surreal, and the urban/suburban landscapes are accented by the occasional appearance of wildlife and the presence (and voices) of trees. Handled with grace and intelligence, these stories chronicle contemporary struggles: the violence and the joy examined in equal measure.

Author Bio

Catherine Gammon is author of the novels The Martyrs, The Lovers (55 Fathoms, 2023). Her fiction has appeared in literary magazines for many years, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, Cincinnati Review and The Missouri Review among them. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts among others, as well as from colonies including the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and Djerassi.