American Homes (21St Century Prose)

Poetry / Fiction / Art / Aphorisms. American Homes incorporates poetry, prose, and various schematic devices, including dozens of illustrations by the artist Jacob Heustis, to create a cracked narrative of the domestic spaces we inhabit.

Literature & Fiction

Ridge, Ryan

Humor & Satire

University of Michigan Press

Fiction. A sham pastor hires a cocaine-sniffing centaur to act as mascot for an Evangelical mega-church's arena football team; Paul Revere flashes across a revolutionary sky on the back of a sunbird; an ammo-less infantry drummer and a bleeding medic are beat back to a Best Western parking lot in the Battle of Sacramento&mdash;such are the situations contained in Ryan Ridge's HUNTERS & GAMBLERS. Winners of the negative lottery, these characters have learned to love to lose everything until there's nothing left to lose. And the end is desperate, black, drenched in whiskey, but punctuated by poignancy and revelry and revelation. The tales in this lurid, edgy debut illuminate blackness with even blacker humor and a sense of outlandish beauty.

Hunters & Gamblers

Dark Sky Books

"Ryan Ridge's verbal prestidigitation suggest a more rueful Mark Leyner, and he can make you both laugh and wince, but he can also kick up your pulse with a storytelling urgency that thrums under the attractively fragmented surfaces. His hard-boiled punchlines are rooted in geography and yearning and real American sadness." --Jonathan Lethem, author of&nbsp;Motherless Brooklyn&nbsp;and&nbsp;The Feral Detective &nbsp; InNew Bad News, the frenetic and far-out worlds of fading celebrities, failed festival promoters, underemployed adjuncts, and overly aware chatbots collide. A Terminator statue comes to life at the Hollywood Wax Museum; a coyote laps up Colt 45, as a passerby looks on in existential quietude; a detective disappears while investigating a missing midwestern cam girl. Set in Kentucky, Hollywood, and the afterlife, these bright, bold short-shorts and stories construct an uncannily familiar, alternate-reality America.

New Bad News (The Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature)

Sarabande Books

Equal parts prose-poems, flash stories, riddles, and mythological prologues to the lives of spent Americans—struggling, murderous, born again, drug-addled, sexual, hopeful, despairing, soaring—this collection stands on the edge of genre definition and questions what it means to be at the cusp of living. Punchlines, plays on words, dad puns, and yo’ mama jokes straddle the saddle with deep metaphorical lessons on society today, making companions of dark humor and serious wit. A seance of poetics and politics, this collection of glimpses into the disheveled and desperate, the cerebral and celebrated, the gangly and glorious, conjures what it is to be American in a society as stupid as it is terrifying. Illustrated by Jacob Heustis.

Second Acts in American Lives

Current, Alternating

Bosworth, Mel

Short Stories & Anthologies

Alternating Current

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Books by Ridge, Ryan