In Steve Karas’ debut collection, an unemployed autoworker finds himself at an elite seminar for aspiring Santa Clauses; an IT specialist eagerly awaits the Mayan apocalypse in his parents’ basement as his father descends into dementia. Through fourteen curiously ambivalent studies, Karas methodically examines and reconfigures the core archetypes—dot-com entrepreneurs, hard-striving immigrants, obsessive diner owners—that haunt and dominate the American psyche.  Their narratives, set against a dizzying panorama that stretches from the ruins of post-2008 Detroit to the desperate paradise of suburban Florida, evoke the familiar American mythology of army bases, Manhattan high-rises, and Midwestern video stores. Yet Karas’ masterful, minimalist portraits are ambiguous and tinged with uncertainty.  The winners, losers and hopeless visionaries who populate Kinda Sorta American Dream are united in their relentless quest to induce massive disruption in their lives—and their profound doubts about whether such radical change is possible.  

Kinda Sorta American Dream: Collected Stories

Literature & Fiction

Karas, Steve

Literary

Tailwinds Press Enterprises LLC

<p>The first triennial collected volume of winners and top-five finalists of the Luminaire Awards for Best Prose and Best Poetry for the years 2014 through 2016. Features 13 gut-punching short stories and 15 heart-rending poems by various authors, each piece having won out over hundreds of others to be selected as the best work of its respective year through a blind judging process, conducted by Alternating Current Press and external judges. Walk with storytellers through tales of domestic violence, children disappearing on spaceships, a car-parts thief at the scene of an accident, a gravedigger pulling the plug on a childhood nightmare, attending Santa Claus school, telling your secrets to strangers, and a dangerous proposal for fertility. Explore Tennessee, chase bombmakers out of hostage situations, come of age, stand at the Alamo, walk down Birch Street, pick apples, and return to your roots in these stories and poems by some of the independent press’ finest contemporary writers.</p>

The Sky Is a Free Country: The Luminaire Award Anthology Volume I

Shonkwiler, Eric

Current, Alternating

Catalano, Kevin

Wright, Amy

Guruianu, Andrei

Benson, Schuler

Winn, Sarah Ann

Carnie, Jared A.

Buchinger, Mary

United States

Alternating Current

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