Fiction. What saves us? It's a question as old—and as urgent—as humanity itself. With this remarkable book, award-winning poet, essayist, and short story writer Gary Fincke opens an exciting new chapter of his career. Structured as a novel-in-stories, HOW BLASPHEMY SOUNDS TO GOD explores our capacity for loyalty and love as it delves into the lives of people on the brink of faith. In prose so pitch-perfect you'll forget you're reading, Fincke lays open the hearts and souls of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, daughters and sons—each in their own way struggling to protect themselves from the chaos of life, reaching for things they only barely know exist... or fleeing those they can't quite see. Set in the tumult of the nineteen sixties, HOW BLASPHEMY SOUNDS TO GOD explores the lives of average people rocked by the seismic shifts around them: the specter of Communism, the war in Vietnam, the space race, the Kennedys and Camelot, and the many shifting social mores that spark and flash and too often catch fire. Whether it's a young mother facing her mortality or a wife flaunting her sexual freedom in front of her husband or a father trying to prepare his child for the dangers of life, Gary Fincke handles the fragile lives of his characters with a respect and understanding that will take your breath away. Displaying the same unwavering sensitivity and brilliantly observed detail that brought him two Pushcart Prizes, a Flannery O'Connor Award, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize, and many other honors, Gary Fincke has produced a book of heart-breaking depth. Here is a writer at the height of his craft.

How Blasphemy Sounds to God

Literature & Fiction

Fincke, Gary

Contemporary

Braddock Avenue Books

In these essays, Gary Fincke combines a journalist’s relentless investigations into the darkest corners of the human condition with an academic’s love for arcana. In one essay, almost forgotten homeopathic recipes from the pantries of Pennsylvania Dutch country are interwoven with the panicked absurdities of elementary school health classes in the 1960s. In another, old case files of small town murders intertwine with meditations on all the fears, large and small, that accompany parenting. In The Darkness Call, Fincke plumbs the depths―child abuse, violence, illness, grief―not for their sadness but for moments of courage, hope, empathy, and light.

The Darkness Call: Essays

Essays & Correspondence

Pleiades Press

In these twelve intelligent tales, seasoned poet and story writer Gary Fincke reconciles lost hope and quiet despair with small blessings and ultimate redemption. In his world, as easily as one man becomes a hero, another is riddled with failure. Fincke weaves together the large and small tragedies of daily life to create an inescapable, yet at times oddly comforting, reality. His characters inhabit a world of strip malls and fast-food joints, low-down jobs and physical ailments, lottery tickets and cheap beer. Here, everyone and everything is suspicious, and only the luck of the draw determines who, if anyone, will survive.In the title story, Ben, a fifty-year-old bookstore clerk facing the possibility of prostate cancer, feels his life spiraling out of control as he endures his female doctor's examinations with childlike embarrassment on the one hand and struggles to conceal his age from his teenybopper coworkers on the other. Ben's only consolation is that "every day he heard about something a hundred times worse." In "Gatsby, Tender, Paradise," Bridgeford encounters a group of lightning strike and electrocution victims and feels lucky to have survived several light-switch shocks―the same type of shocks that have permanently disabled one man in the group. Such are the small but important blessings that ultimately rescue Fincke's characters from despair. Here at last is someone who can articulate both our constant, mortal desire to transcend ordinary experience and our simultaneous comfort in the unremarkable and familiar.

Sorry I Worried You

Short Stories & Anthologies

Univ of Georgia Pr

Sorry I Worried You: Stories (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction Ser.)

Literary

University of Georgia Press

Troubled relationships between parents and children, most of them adults or at least in their late teens, provide the framework for many stories in this collection. In "Faculty X," a middle-aged son witnesses his mother's fixation with death and her attempt to cope with senility. "If I lose my glasses for good, you have to promise me you'll buy another pair just like them. I can't be buried without my glasses. I wouldn't be myself." In "Keeping Nice," Greg Haskins deals with his conflicting emotions of "contempt" for his aging mother's obsession to keep her belongings "nice" by covering them with plastic and his own fear of the uncontrollable forces around him.
Both "Callback" and the moving title story, "Emergency Calls," explore the anxieties of parents trying to balance the need to protect their teenage children with the task of making them accountable for their own often self-destructive actions. "Darwin in the City" centers on a man's paranoia and anxiety attacks over everything from hearing his wife gurgle her last breath into her pillow to the impending blindness that he knows will be his fate. In "The Tabloid Strategy" an elderly man is determined to create a new beginning for himself. "'I'm running for office,' Lou Gorski said to his daughter on his seventy-first birthday. 'I'm starting my second life.'" The reader soon discovers, however, that starting a second life isn't quite that simple.
With vivid description and compelling dialogue, Gary Fincke pulls the reader deep into these stories and into the lives of these unforgettable characters. Emergency Calls is a masterful collection by a truly gifted writer.

Emergency Calls: Stories (Volume 1)

United States

University of Missouri

A university maintenance worker and his wife decide to give birth to their anencephalic baby and to accept all the consequences that will follow. During summer vacation, a journalism student trysts with his girlfriend at her suspicious father’s house and soon witnesses the ultimate in paternal vengeance. A schoolboy faces peer violence while his mother struggles with cancer, each relying upon a hopelessly misplaced faith. In The Stone Child, Gary Fincke presents characters at turning points, where the effects of their decisions will ripple throughout the rest of their lives.“Clean Shaven” depicts the last family vacation of a couple with two nearly grown children; in a few pivotal days, Reynolds, the father, struggles with, accepts, then embraces, his comradeship with his roguish, college-expelled son. In “Natural Borders,” the way a small-town sheriff handles the marital problems of a pair of eccentrics leads to a conflagration that will haunt him forever.The eleven stories in The Stone Child are about families of varying kinds, what binds them, and what threatens to tear them apart. Under pressure, the characters strive to maintain whatever connections they have established with one another. In important ways, all of these stories, even those with exclusively adult characters, are coming-of-age tales, the characters arriving at those points in their lives when what they do and say will mark significant passages. Fincke brings great humanity to his characters and displays a sharp and wry sense of humor; his sense of place is strong, his stories richly textured, and his prose a joy to read. Primarily meditating on the viewpoints of male characters, Fincke gives us stories with beginnings that pull us right in and endings that won’t let us leave the world of the story until long after we have finished reading.

The Stone Child: Stories (Volume 1)

A university maintenance worker and his wife decide to give birth to their anencephalic baby and to accept all the consequences that will follow. During summer vacation, a journalism student trysts with his girlfriend at her suspicious father's house and soon witnesses the ultimate in paternal vengeance. A schoolboy faces peer violence while his mother struggles with cancer, each relying upon a hopelessly misplaced faith. In The Stone Child, Gary Fincke presents characters at turning points, where the effects of their decisions will ripple throughout the rest of their lives. "Clean Shaven" depicts the last family vacation of a couple with two nearly grown children; in a few pivotal days, Reynolds, the father, struggles with, accepts, then embraces, his comradeship with his roguish, college-expelled son. In "Natural Borders," the way a small-town sheriff handles the marital problems of a pair of eccentrics leads to a conflagration that will haunt him forever. The eleven stories in The Stone Child are about families of varying kinds, what binds them, and what threatens to tear them apart. Under pressure, the characters strive to maintain whatever connections they have established with one another. In important ways, all of these stories, even those with exclusively adult characters, are coming-of-age tales, the characters arriving at those points in their lives when what they do and say will mark significant passages. Fincke brings great humanity to his characters and displays a sharp and wry sense of humor; his sense of place is strong, his stories richly textured, and his prose a joy to read. Primarily meditating on the viewpoints of male characters, Fincke gives us stories with beginnings that pull us right in and endings that won't let us leave the world of the story until long after we have finished reading.

The Stone Child: Stories

The Canals of Mars is a memoir that explores and ponders "weakness," which in Gary Fincke's family was the catch-all term for every possible human flaw-physical, psychological, or spiritual. Fincke grew up near Pittsburgh during the 1950s and 1960s, raised by blue-collar parents for whom the problems that beset people-from alcoholism to nearsightedness to asthma to fear of heights-were nothing but weaknesses. In a highly engaging style, Fincke meditates on the disappointments he suffered-in his body, his mind, his work-because he was convinced that he had to be "perfect." Anything less than perfection was weakness and no one, he understood from an early age, wants to be weak. Six of the chapters in the book have been cited in Best American Essays. The chapter that provides the book's title, The Canals of Mars, won a Pushcart Prize and was included in The Pushcart Book of Essays: The Best Essays from a Quarter Century of the Pushcart Prize.

The Canals of Mars: A Memoir

History

Michigan State University Press

The Double Negatives of the Living

Poetry

Zoland Books

Inventing Angels: Poems

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