A THOUSAND DISTANT RADIOS by Woody Skinner
Longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
In a debut that has immediately sparked comparisons to the work of earlier masters, Woody Skinner makes his mark as a boldly imaginative new voice. Written with dark humor and folkloric flair, the stories in A Thousand Distant Radios capture the passions and compulsions of modern America in unforgettable imagery and saturated color.
A marlin swims circles in a luminous backyard pool; a small-town surgeon broods from the Olympus of his hilltop house, watched all the while by his neighbors below; a knife salesman plies blades of mythic sharpness while crisscrossing a crazed North American landscape like a mad Paul Bunyan; a young man in rural Arkansas nestles into a satellite dish; and a grandfather’s body lies in state amid Annie Oakley’s last buffalo kill, General Patton’s Persian rug, and countless other oddments of a legendary America.
Skewed, hyperbolical, sometimes surreal, always irresistible, here is fiction honed to cut through the blur of our times. You won’t soon forget this book.
