Editor’s Note: This is a shameless self-promotion; however, we are excited to announce the publication of our first book of short stories, Last Train Home, by Austin MacAuley Publishers. An inconvenient reality for modern (classic) publishing is that the author must also assume some responsibility for marketing the work, so here you have it.
From the publisher:
Wayne Creed’s debut collection pulls no punches. These are stories about people surviving on the edges—Eastern Shore watermen whose lives have collapsed, the junkies and car thieves marking time, and the wheelchair-bound and forgotten trying to carve out meaning in a world that’s moved on without them.
Written with unflinching honesty and surprising lyricism, Last Train Home maps the forgotten corners of life where loneliness mingles with grace, violence brushes against tenderness, and the desperate search for connection plays out in dive bars, detention centers, and abandoned churches. Creed’s characters—ex-nuns and altar boys, teachers and drifters, boxers and bell ringers—navigate worlds where the American Dream has curdled into something darker, yet somehow, improbably, moments of beauty still break through.
Raw, lyrical, and uncompromising, Last Train Home announces a bold new voice in American fiction—one unafraid to look directly at what we’d rather turn away from. From fishing villages to the streets of Moscow, Creed finds in the darkest corners the beauty and persistence of the human spirit. Last Train Home offers no easy answers—only the hard truth that grace sometimes arrives on the last train, just before the station closes for good.
That said, some of these stories, some of these characters, and some of these situations are not for everyone. What I learned from studying under Richard Bausch, Susan Shreve, and Vasily Aksyonov, the story has to be allowed to go where it wants and needs to go, whether the writer wants it to or not. You have to give the story room to breathe. This collection goes to some ugly and sometimes violent places, but they are true places, places where the stories needed to go–what ties them together is a tattered belief that, despite it all, there is still a weak glimmer of grace and beauty that is impossible to extinguish.
I am proud of the work. The writing is lean; not a word or sentence is wasted, and the voice travels across genre, from classic American Realism (Phillip Roth, John Updike, Raymond Carver), Southern Gothic (Capote, O’Connor), and Magic Realism (Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Akunin). The short story is a dying art, and its place in the world is becoming less relevant every year. But for folks like me (ADHD, dyslexic, commitment issues), they are useful–you can read a story and put it down without the pressure to finish a tome.
Each story Last Train Home is a world of its own, whether they are funny, sad, or ugly. But I love every character, and every story is beautiful in its own way.
The book is available from the publisher here, or from online retailers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Note: This is the end of the shameless self-promotion.
So it goes.
About the Author
Fantastic! How have the sales been? Brisk, I am sure!
-Walter