About the Book
The anthology, Beyond Where the Buses Run: Stories, represents a compilation of six writers' visions of what can happen in a life. The writers' include Meagan Bejar, Robert Crane, Joe Coyle, Christopher Fryer, Kari Hildebrand, and Theresa Griffin Kennedy. The stories share the directions we go in, how we touch one another, how we hurt each other, and all while engaged in the sometimes lonely, sometimes frightening journey traversing a uniquely American landscape. The stories also contend with the natural world, fantasy, symbolism, and present other possible puzzles for the reader to unfurl. The tone, point of view, stylistic variations and delivery are all uniquely different and provide the reader with a broad sampling. The fiction stories contend in one form or another with the ways people cope with change and what is seen, unseen, or even intentionally hidden from our closest loved ones, or from ourselves. Finally, the stories take on with what it means to be human in a harsh and exacting world, becoming what one critic has referred to as a collection which offers "a special kind of American loneliness and quiet desperation."
About the Author :
The authors include Robert Crane, Joe Coyle, Christopher Fryer, Kari Hildebrand, Theresa Griffin Kennedy, and Meagan Bejar. Christopher Fryer is coauthor of Bruce Dern: Things I've Said, But Probably Shouldn't Have - An Unrepentant Memoir and is a contributor to Hal Ashby: Interviews. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley with his family where he continues to write and be published.
Review :
A special kind of American loneliness and quiet desperation haunts the stories in this fine collection. The people we meet in Beyond Where the Buses Run: Stories are mostly working class, battling betrayals, the sudden violence so often at the edge of American life, rising to the occasional triumphs. Here is a hunt for love, companionship, maybe just meaning. In other words, real lives being lived. A constant presence is nature, even in the city--the cold breezes off the Pacific Coast, the hot winds from the desert just east. "I felt the loneliness that seemed to be an integral part of me," a woman confesses in one of the stories. She speaks for many.
Joseph B. Atkins, writer and journalist, teaches journalism at the University of Mississippi and is the author of Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood's Zen Rebel (2020) and the novel Casey's Last Chance (2015).
From a young boy's place in the crossfire of divorce, to a private investigator rooting out malfeasance and grift in the heartland, to the endless cyclical repetitions of life played out at an all-night go-kart track, Beyond Where the Buses Run: Stories, gives voice to people often voiceless, explores the small turns on which lives change hugely, and illuminates family and community dynamics in places far from the brightly-lit cities. Crane, Coyle, the late Kari Hildebrand, and the other authors of this collection create a very real world both familiar and unfamiliar to its readers in an illuminating work.
Edward J Delaney, author of Broken Irish, 2011 and The Drowning: And Other Stories, 2000.
Bus routes are inherently predictable. The short stories in Beyond Where the Buses Run: Stories take the reader to places that extend past the comfort of familiarity. A young hunter that's never been able to kill, a child mourning his late father, an aimless young man pursuing a woman that doesn't care for him while avoiding those that do, a lonely old woman who takes in a squirrel for a pet, and the other characters in these insightful tales experience unexpected detours and destinations. As is true of the best fiction, much like life itself.
Andrew A. Erish, author of Col. William N. Selig, the Man Who Invented Hollywood, and Vitagraph: America's First Great Motion Picture Studio, 2021.
A tuxedo-wearing go-kart mechanic on a quixotic quest for true love; a talking squirrel with criminal aspirations (but the noblest of intentions) - these are just two of the wonderful characters you will meet in this marvelous collection of short stories, Beyond Where the Buses Run: Stories. By turns absurd and insightful, this collection takes you on an imaginative tour of the human interior. Often absurd -- but never lacking some shade of profundity! -- it's an assortment of nuanced perspectives on specific experience, providing an entertaining, even moving, glimpse into what it means to be human in all its idiosyncratic glory.
Drew Vinton, Executive Vice President, Pearl Street Films
