Bull Head

"A heartbreaking portrait of what it means to be a man in a world where violence trumps reason, and bad decisions begin with good intentions. With wit, tenderness, and intelligence, Bull Head exposes the raw underbelly of male experience."--Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story A line-dancing aficionado visits his brother in jail in hopes of mending their relationship, and instead discovers his own unwitting role in his brother's failed life. After the death of his wife and children, a logger tries to survive the Thanksgiving weekend on his own. A delinquent teen's life is changed forever by a work-camp placement with a violent older boy. A truck driver seeks sanctuary from his abusive wife in a fantasy world of strip clubs and personal ads. Bristling with restlessness and brutality, these linked stories set in the Pacific Northwest catapult readers into the gritty lives of social outcasts lost in purgatories of their own making. John Vigna tempers raw and at times cruel rural masculinity with graceful prose and breathtaking tenderness to illuminate the plight of men living in small towns and backwoods who belong neither to history nor the future. A startling homage to the great Southern Gothic tradition, Bull Head is a dazzling debut that heralds a powerful and exciting new literary voice. John Vigna is an alumnus of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His fiction and non fiction have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines. John lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife, writer Nancy Lee.

About the Author :
John Vigna is an alumnus of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His fiction and non-fiction has appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines, and anthologies including The Dalhousie Review, Grain, Event, subTerrain, and The Antigonish Review.

Review :
"A heartbreaking portrait of what it means to be a man in a world where violence trumps reason, and bad decisions begin with good intentions. With wit, tenderness and intelligence, Bull Head exposes the raw underbelly of male experience." --Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story "John Vigna's prose grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let go. The characters in Bull Head never give up--they keep trying to fulfill themselves by taking action. Like all of us, their decisions were the best option at the time, but in retrospect often caused more difficulty and damage. Bull Head is a brilliant book by a writer who never flinches." --Chris Offutt, author of Kentucky Straight "Bull Head is a remarkable collection of rough-edged stories about the hard lives of men and women living and working in hard places, and John Vigna's eye for detail, gift for description and unflagging empathy are the keys that unlock these characters' closely guarded hearts and give us access to their weary, yearning souls." --Richard Lange, author of Dead Boys "Iowa Writers' Workshop alumnus John Vigna's muscular debut transplants Southern gothic to the Pacific Northwest in eight dark tales of men and women haunted by lost partners and strained relations ... While there is bravado on display, Vigna also prods the underbelly of these emotions, revealing the insecurities of man." --Publishers Weekly "Muscular, lyrical prose ... This impressive debut collection will appeal to readers of literary fiction like James Dickey's Deliverance, Larry Brown's Joe, and Annie Proulx's Wyoming stories." --Booklist "A country-noir vision of rural existence ... Vigna showcases an aptly spare style and an impressive willingness to explore the fraught relationships of guys deeply flummoxed, or else defeated, by the wintery meanness of getting by in the valley." --The Globe and Mail "The men in Vigna's tales resort to physical brutality as an expression of a kind of existential yearning; on a thematic level, these are stories of paralysis -- of characters' inability to rise above their circumstances -- that owe as much to the work of Beckett and Joyce as to Hemingway and O'Connor." --National Post "The spare, disciplined beauty of Vigna's prose and his evident but unsentimental compassion for them floods this dark material with a kind of tender light." --Vancouver Sun