Marooned at a backwater college and hungry for more, Athletic Director Scott Darrow plots his ascent to a better job at a better school. 
He has the talent, charm and Machiavellian nerve to go far, but when he hires a famous coach to run his basketball program, the coach proves to be unstable and possibly insane. 
Now, to escape professional oblivion, Darrow must maneuver and manipulate this coach, and manage the town's intensifying suspicions. No measure is too drastic. No tactic too cruel. But complicating Darrow's work is his own unsettled history, and in wrestling with this history, Darrow begins to understand his frail coach with jarring personal clarity. 
Perhaps the two men aren't as dissimilar as they'd seemed. And perhaps Darrow's future-even if it's triumphant-will mean not banishing his ghosts, but living forever in their company.

The Sea Lanterns

Sports & Outdoors

Nickol, Ben

Coaching

Vine Leaves Press

Fiction. "With beautiful and harrowing distillation, Ben Nickol's stories reveal how we love and how we lose what we love. Deft and affecting, this is an impressive collection."--E.J. Levy "Like the river itself, Ben Nickol's stories wind through some wild and rich country, full of beauty and peril both. Leaving the pretty myths behind, Nickol sets off into the lives of everyday people doing all they can to get by on the edges of wild places. These are stories and lives that will stay with you long after the last page is turned."--Pete Fromm "The stories in SUN RIVER bear the clean force and beauty of a Rocky Mountain rainstorm. They are fierce, tugging, and unforgettable. Sometimes a new American voice comes to us like dark thunder. Ben Nickol is that voice."--Alyson Hagy "Ben Nickol's SUN RIVER is an exquisitely crafted and thoroughly engaging book of short stories set in North Idaho and Western Montana. Struggling with decisions made by and for them, Nickol's men and women bicker and yearn in off-putting witticisms and common sense wisdom. His study here is nothing less than an American vernacular, the language of a people worn and scarred by time and place and decisions big and small. However flawed and desperate, they try, they endure, hopeful and defiant. Illuminated by hard-won insights, Nickol's SUN RIVER is a meditative, rewarding read."--Marc Bojanowski

Sun River

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Black Lawrence Press

A man in a troubled marriage tries to learn from the example of his charismatic friend, a bestselling author who hasn't abandoned his youthful convictions. A story of divergent paths, Adherence examines characters pushed to the limits of what they can understand, one struggling with suburban life while the other wrestles with self-image and artistic devotion. Set throughout Chicago and shadowed by race and class, this short novel is a rich portrait of the public and private divides that define American life.

Adherence: A Romance (Short-ish: novellas + essays)

United States

Outpost19

In Where the Wind Can Find It, people are swayed off-course. From a ski resort to a church rectory, an outgrown hometown to the wilderness itself, Ben Nickol's characters find themselves at the mercy of forces at once within themselves and profoundly beyond their control. This predicament, the kind that comes with everyday living, offers no clean escapes, yet whether it is the legacy of a gambler, the impulses of an adulterer, or the despair of a washed-up athlete, this debut collection explores what it means to plot a route through one's own flaws and the long shadows of personal history.

Where the Wind Can Find It

Queen's Ferry Press

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Books by Nickol, Ben