From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet: Stories

Winner of the 2009 Hudson Prize Brutality, defeat, loneliness, mournful longing, and comic absurdity haunt and ignite the eight stories in Patrick Michael Finn's prize-winning collection with a vast assembly of unforgettable characters confronted by life-changing crises that force them to make impossible choices. Some redeem their dignity while others are crushed by irreversible loss and spiritual destruction.

About the Author :
Patrick Michael Finn was born in Joliet, Illinois, and was raised there and in rural Southern California. He completed his BA at the University of California, Riverside, and his MFA at the University of Arizona, where he was a Dean's Teaching Fellow. His first book, the novella "A Martyr for Suzy Kosasovich," was selected by Tom Barbash as winner of the 2006 Ruthanne Wiley Memorial Novella Competition and published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. A winner of the AWP Intro Award, selected by Benjamin Alire Saenz, and the 2004 Third Coast Fiction Prize, judged by Stuart Dybek, Finn's stories have appeared in "Ploughshares," "TriQuarterly," "Third Coast," "Quarterly West," "The Clackamas Literary Review," "Punk Planet," and Houghton Mifflin's "The Best American Mystery Stories 2004." His fiction has also received citations in the 2005's "The""Pushcart Prize XXIX" and "The Best American Short Stories 2008." He has taught writing at the University of Arizona, Western Nebraska Community College, and the University of North Carolina, Asheville, where he was awarded the 2006 Teaching Excellence Award. In 2007, he founded and currently coordinates the creative writing program at Chandler-Gilbert Community College. He lives in Arizona with his wife, poet Valerie Bandura, and their son James.

Review :
"Let us all hope that "From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet" is just the first of many story collections by Patrick Michael Finn. Populated with destitute strippers, damaged punks, polka lovers, bereaved widows, and the chronic unemployed amid lard factories and Catholic churches and gritty streets, these are the kind of stories that Balzac might have written if he had visited the economically ravaged American Midwest in the early 1980s. With the force of a massive heart attack brought on by a steady diet of corn-beef hash and Camel cigarettes and hard, hard living, Finn has put Joliet, Illinois, on the literary map forever. It is an awesome book by a great, great writer." --Donald Ray Pollock, author of "The Devil All the Time"" ""Place is a character in Patrick Michael Finn's fiction. It's almost as if the setting, like the working-class characters who people his stories, has an ethnicity. The characters try to go on with their lives while the place broods and mourns around them. And all the while the narratives driven by credible psychological pressure grow increasingly threatening until the elegiac becomes rage. This is artful storytelling." --Stuart Dybek, author of "I Sailed with Magellan"