"Stories turn corners. They bump into you: You take them!" So New York writer Benjamin Kohlman has been told by one of many former bosses. Alone again and desperate, Kohlman has finally found his: Janice Stewart, recently acquitted of the grisly arson/murder of her father-in-law. Kohlman follows Janice to Las Vegas where she works as a keno runner. Anxious to start his book, Kohlman offers Janice, now known as Angel, a contract. The elusive, innocent Angel construes it as a marriage contract, and Kohlman's bizarre adventures begin.
Mysteriously treated like a high-roller in the casinos, Kohlman is beaten, stabbed, and shot. His wounds are salved by a doctor and his wife who offer a kinky interpretation of the Hippocratic oath. A black messianic boxer known as Challenger teaches Kohlman the meditative art of psychokinesis, and together they perform amazing feats. Angel, who introduces the resistant Kohlman as her husband, loves him with an unconditional devotion he has never known.
But after all his trials, Kohlman may be redeemed through shedding his own blood and through his growing love for Angel. Western Literature Series.

Keno Runner: A Dark Romance (Western Literature and Fiction Series)

Literature & Fiction

Kranes, David

Humor & Satire

University of Nevada Press

The eleven short stories in Low Tide in the Desert celebrate a master storyteller's longtime fascination with Nevada, from the deliberately hallucinogenic urban distractions of Reno and Las Vegas to disturbing legends born in Jackpot and Battle Mountain. Some of Kranes's characters we want to know; others we would go out of our way to avoid. But he treats his vivid cross-section of humanity with dignity and even a tenderness completely without sentimentality. Some win, some lose, some are transformed, but, quintessential Nevadans, they all hope.

Low Tide In The Desert: Nevada Stories (Western Literature Series)

United States

The title story is about three men who go hunting on a cold, snowy day. Their unsuccessful hunt leads to violence and an unexpected end. I had to read the story a few times to really appreciate it because of the subtlety of the characters. A deeper analysis of this story is really needed to enjoy it at all. If I was just reading through the book, I might skip over it as enjoyable, but there is something here. Good storytelling by the author. I am interested in reading more titles by him.

Hunters in the Snow: : A Collection of Short Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

Univ of Utah Pr

Corey Burdock is a simple man living a simple life. Raising his son Rock, alone, after his wife abandons them, Corey takes refuge in nurturing the trees on his northern California land. The needs of trees are easily understood. The needs of sons are not. When the president calls the Burdocks to accept Corey's offer of a perfect Sitka spruce to become the National Christmas tree, Corey has no idea how profoundly the simple delivery of the tree from his California home to Washington D.C. will change his life. As Corey and Rock trek across the country, their journey becomes more than just 3,000 miles traveled. It becomes a journey of discovery for father and son, and a simple gesture of patriotism that galvanizes a nation.

The National Tree

Literary

Huntington Press

Objects easily appear and disappear in Peck’s hands, and so do people. “Into the void,” the young magician writes on a sheet of paper. “What’s supposed to happen doesn’t” and “What’s not supposed to happen does.” That’s all the sense he can make of life, and the uncertainty produces hilarious results. The “theory of failed expectations”—if you can’t control the outcome, then roll with it. And roll he does, all the way to Puerto Villarta, Corfu, and Paris—letting life come to him rather than searching for the “divination of secrets.” In the end, he finds both.“For the record, I am in this book and you are in this book. When they make the movie, it’s going to feature everybody. David Kranes writes from the marrow, and this novel is fierce and crammed with heart. It’s cerebral and cinematic, and if feels—like all of Kranes’ prose—like something new and something old. A man loves his life in the ways he can, and Peck’s ways are rich. I would say this book is about family and love and time. But it isn’t about something, it is something! If I were with you now, I’d put it in your hand. Wait, fortune, it has already appeared! So, now you’ll see what I mean.” —Ron Carlson, author of A Kind of Flying.

Making the Ghost Dance: A Novel

Contemporary

Signature Books

<div>Part of our socialization is the urge to perform. We perform images of ourselves for others. For some, the urge is so great and the talent sufficient that we become performers. Performance Art is a series of short stories about performers and performances that are extreme--fire-eaters, knife-throwers, stand-up comedians, escape-artists, weight-loss artists--why we watch them, and why they do what they do. David Kranes dives into the inner lives of these risk-takers, exploring the allures and the costs of "performance." &nbsp;His characters are unpredictable, quirky, and sometimes bizarre, but Kranes also reveals their humanity and insecurities. The result is a collection that is engagingly unique, sometimes comical, ironic, heart-tugging, and full of unexpected insights and delights.</div>

Performance Art: Stories

Collection of plays by David Kranes

David Kranes Selected Plays

Dramas & Plays

Level 4 Press, Inc.

The stories in The Legend's Daughter inhabit present–day Idaho where fires, streams, and landscapes ask—even demand—that individuals reconsider and reorient their lives. An award–winning playwright, David Kranes infuses this collection with swift dialogue and complicated characters, including a kayaking actor, a rebellious high school teacher, and a lipstick–loving fly fisherman. A 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award Winner "In this exceptional collection of stories set mostly in Idaho in the deep backwoods along river banks and lonely county roads, Kranes' characters are all thrown out of their comfort zones. And so is the reader. Richly drawn and complex, these stories challenge the intellect. Kranes has managed to somehow dam the river of souls these stories possess. They do not lie still, however, between the covers but rather spin in farreaching whirlpools of genuine humanity and mortality." 15 Bytes "There's something to be said about a writer whose style is easily recognized, whose voice stands out, whose stories are readily identified. What’s remarkable about David Kranes's writing and these stories, though, is that each story stands out on its own merit, while every story is well crafted and conceived. Nothing one-dimensional about his people, nothing one dimensional about his prose, either." ForeWord Reviews From rainbow trout jumping in the Salmon River to watering holes on the edge of McCall Lake, each of the ten stories in author and playwright David Kranes’s The Legend’s Daughter transports the reader to the wilderness of Eastern Idaho. While Kranes renders a common setting in each story, the collection is not simply a detailed portrait of Idaho, but an examination of the lives of restless people seeking to escape from their lives and find peace." ZYZZYVA "The Legend’s Daughter is a story collection of real people struggling with identity, with love, with time, rooted in the rugged and indifferent beauty of Idaho where each character finds his or her mirror in water, in stone, in place. David Kranes shows how our tenacious love of life can transform any situation, large or small, into alchemy. We are all living inside these raw and well-drawn pages." Terry Tempest Williams, author of When Women Were Birds "These Idaho stories are vintage David Kranes. He, more than any other writer, is the one whose work spurs me to reconsider what fiction can do. He uses language like a knife and the worlds in his stories come off the page at me. We haven’t seen this Idaho before. I’m thrilled to have these stories, every one of them provocative, riveting, and robust." Ron Carlson, author of The Signal "In these times of disconnection, David Kranes lassoes us with the delicate tether of his multiple gifts and brings us home . . . a storyteller and an elegant craftsman." Mary Sojourner, author of 29 "David Kranes has given us ten stories, entirely various, often splendid, sometimes hilarious or heartbreaking." William Kittredge, author of The Willow Field

The Legend's Daughter

Torrey House Press

Abracadabra is a fantastical and inventive addition to the tradition of noir writing, which not only delights and surprises at every turn but also raises important questions about identity, the human condition, the nature of evil, and the state of the union. The novel begins with a mystery, when Mark Goodson, a seemingly well-adjusted married man, disappears during a magic act, precipitating a series of events, encounters, and seemingly inexplicable occurrences, which it falls to a former professional football player, Elko Wells, to weave together into a story that is at once compelling and true. The concussion that ended Wells’ playing career left him open to hearing voices and discerning patterns of meaning helpful to his work as the owner of a missing-persons agency. He also owns a celebrity look-alike agency, which complicates matters in humorous ways, and his reliance on a string of cocktail waitresses called the Bloody Marys who are on the lookout for various people adds another level of intrigue. Magicians and misdirection, gambling, down-on-one’s-luck, the crazed sense of possibility and impossibility, mistaken identity, impersonators and body doubles, people acting bizarrely with all sorts of chaos, collisions, and overlaps thrown in for good measure. Again and again the reader is swept into treacherous waters, always confident that the writer is in control of his material. Because the many twists and turns the plot takes are all but impossible to anticipate, the experience of reading Abracadabra is deliciously magical.

Abracadabra: A Novel

Genre Fiction

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