The Out-of-Sorts

Gary Fincke is the author of fourteen short story collections, including A Room of Rain; The Proper Words for Sin; Sorry I Worried You, a winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction; and The Killer's Dog, an Elixir Press Fiction Prize winner. His stories have appeared in such magazines as the Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and CrazyHorse.

"An impressive testament to Gary Fincke's mastery of the short story. The quality about his work that has always appealed to me is how quickly his stories engage and how tenaciously they maintain their hold on the reader. He knows his characters as well as any writer I've come across, and the result is fiction that bursts with life. I enjoyed every page." Steve Yarbrough, author of Safe from the Neighbors "Gary Fincke's collected stories should reveal to thousands of readers what a few of us have known for a long time--he is a master of the form. These stories are ambitious and rigorous, and they aim for nothing less than an examination of what it means to be alive." Robert Boswell, author of Tumbledown and The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards "There's no glamour in Gary Fincke's world, just tough times and hard work. From early on his people know how uncertain life can be--how easy it is to lose hope, and how, sometimes, to get by, we bury what we can't face." Stewart O'Nan, author of Snow Angels and Last Night at the Lobster "These stories read like a collective bildungsroman of a region, giving voice to those in the Rust Belt who feel displaced and forgotten." Lawrence Coates, author of The Goodbye House and Camp Olvido