Tacoma Stories

(Paperback)

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ACCLAIMED WRITER, BOOKSELLER FAVORITE: Richard Wiley has received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Maria Thomas Fiction Award, and Washington State Book Award. He has also been inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Wileys most recent novel, Bob Stevenson, was lauded by independent booksellers from Massachusetts to Tacoma who celebrated its loveable, quirky characters and called it fun and ingenious in their recommendations.

POPULAR FORMAT OF INTERCONNECTED SHORT STORIES: Tacoma Stories follows in the tradition of Sherwood Andersons classic Winesburg, Ohio by uniting stories with recurring characters around a singular town. While the marketplace can be challenging for short stories, linked collections such as Elizabeth Strouts Pulitzer Prizewinning Olive Kitteridge and Jennifer Egans Pulitzer Prizewinning A Visit from the Goon Squad continue to garner awards, sales, and dedicated readerships on the same level as novels. Wileys collection similarly offers an ideal bridge between the genres, pairing the compressed ingenuity of the short story form with a sustained examination of place and character.

SPOTLIGHT ON TACOMA, REGIONAL CHARM: At the tender age of twenty, Wiley became a bartender at Pats Tavern in Tacoma, the same bar that connects all of the characters in these stories. While Wiley, a previous recipient of the Washington State Book Award, was born in Tacoma and has returned to it throughout his life, he spent many years living abroad and most of his fiction is grounded in locales ranging from Korea to Kenya to Japan. This is the first of his nine books in which he turns all of his attention toward his native Pacific Northwest.

Reviews

Praise for Tacoma Stories

Foreword Reviews Book of the Day selection

Wileys characters are far from absurdist; it might even be accurate to say that they are mid-to-late 20th-century approximations of Chaucers pilgrims . . . all starting out together from Tacoma on a journey through adulthood. . . . Across the pilgrimage of their lives, we see a slow burnishing of their hopes and dreams, but also of their failures. Tacoma itself, like Dublin in James Joyces Dubliners, also asserts its own force of character. . . . Wiley has finally given his city the loving touch it deserves. Peace Corps Worldwide (Ann Neelon)

One reads in the hope of delight. And thats what [Tacoma Stories] provides. The linked stories that make up the collection are deeply pleasureful reads. Peace Corps Worldwide (Mark Jacobs)

[Wiley] is able to articulate a familiar and endearing world of Tacoma, humanizing the city to a reader who may not have even heard of the City of Destiny. Tacoma Ledger

A marvelous mixture of humor and contemplative nostalgia, Tacoma Stories shows us that cities are more than just a collection of buildings, landmarks and roads. Theyre a delicate web of lives and stories, each one connected in ways we might never expect. Puget Sound Trail

Read[s] well as a literary version of a concept album with a unified theme. Tacoma Weekly

Tacoma is underrepresented in literature, so this book presents a tremendous opportunity. Seattle Review of Books

Wileys antic, wrenching collection of 14 interlocking stories reveals the subtle connections among a dozen characters whose unpredictable lives evolve through the decades in the title city. . . . [It] provides a tentatively affirmative answer to the question raised by a fictional version of the daughter of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth: Do you think a town can act as a hedge against the unabated loneliness of the human heart Publishers Weekly

This linked set of seriocomic stories that hopscotches across a half-century . . . emphasizes unlikely transformations over timeand, as the title suggests, the role of place in those transformations. And though Wiley juggles plenty of characters, he has a light touch thats fitting for a book rooted in the free-wheeling 60s. Kirkus Reviews

Compelling. . . . The genius of [Tacoma Stories] is that the relationships between characters and their backstories add depth to each entry, but the individual tales are still strong enough to stand on their own. Foreword Reviews

Wiley shines in the short form, absorbing the reader in slices of one town and its inhabitants while rendering them universal. Shelf Awareness for Readers

An extraordinarily entertaining read from cover to cover. Midwest Book Review

Very highly recommended. . . . While the narratives are all strong individual stories, presented together as a whole they create a masterful collection and reflection on life over the decades. She Treads Softly

Vivid and as varied as you can get. . . . Amusing, chilling, and sometimes downright bizarre, readers of short story collections with a unified theme will enjoy this. Barbarian Librarian

Richard Wiley is one of our best writers. These stories satisfy in the way that brilliant short fiction always satisfies; one feels as if one has absorbed the expansive vision and drama of a novel. Read slowly, and I bet youll want to read again. Richard Bausch, author of Peace and Living in the Weather of the World

Its a strange and winsome feeling I have, reading Tacoma Stories, the blue sensation that Richard Wiley has made me homesick for a place Ive never been, mourning the loss of friends I never had, in a life where each and every one of us is loved, however imperfectly. Think Sherwood Anderson inhabiting Raymond Carvers Northwest and youll have a clear picture of Wileys accomplishment. Bob Shacochis, author of Easy in the Islands and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

Select Praise for Richard Wiley

A gifted writer who can create and sustain tension with spare, unembellished prose. New York Times Book Review

In what I like to consider a one-man mission of literary reparations . . . Richard Wiley appears not necessarily to integrate but to insert himself unobtrusively, a watchful eye and empathizing listener, into alien identities, operating through plain, credible protagonists. Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate in Literature

Wiley writes like he was born and raised everywhere. Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage and Night Hawks

If there is such a thing as global fiction, Wiley is writing it. Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter and A Permanent Member of the Family

Wiley has given us a fascinating and utterly convincing portrait of a young man caught between two cultures and struggling to understand both. T.C. Boyle, author of The Tortilla Curtain and The Relive Box and Other Stories, on Festival for Three Thousand Maidens

Author Bio

Richard Wiley is the author of Tacoma Stories and eight novels including Bob Stevenson; Soldiers in Hiding, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Washington State Book Award; and Ahmeds Revenge, winner of the Maria Thomas Fiction Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he divides his time between Los Angeles, California, and Tacoma, Washington.