If the Sky Falls is the debut short-story collection from award-winning fiction writer Nicholas Montemarano. These eleven stories show why Jayne Anne Phillips has called Montemarano "an American stylist capable of redeeming our darkest dreams." Redemption in these intense and sometimes violent stories is found in the lyrical prose, in the act of storytelling itself. A young man tries to rescue his sister from her abusive lover, and in the process must revisit his own family's violent history ("Note to Future Self"); a home healthcare worker pops pills and takes two men with cerebral palsy to a strip club ("The Usual Human Disabilities"); a man has a breakdown years after witnessing a brutal murder and doing nothing to help the victim ("The Other Man"). In "The November Fifteen," a man is taken from his home and tortured, though he has no idea why; when he returns home he finds a different kind of torture awaiting him. Two of the stories--"Shift" and the Pushcart Prize--winning "The Worst Degree of Unforgivable"--are stylistic tours de force. But style in this collection is always at the service of story. Montemarano's fiction maintains that rare balance between traditional storytelling and experimentation: his work is innovative without being flashy, sincere without being sentimental. In an age of hype, If the Sky Falls truly is the real thing--an original and important achievement in the short-story form.

"Montemarano plays with the purpose and effect of storytelling in his dark, powerful debut collection (after A Fine Place) even as he crafts believably troubled psyches. The unreliable narrators of these 11 first-person stories are haunted by memories of violence and cruelty they can neither forget nor make sense of; only occasionally do they find redemption and tenderness in unexpected ways. In 'To Fall Apart,'' a man revisits his sister's childhood disappearance, 'the story I have revised so many times that it is now more memory than imagination,'' fantasizing a different, happier ending for her. Stories serve this man as anodynes, albeit temporary ones, allowing him some form of dignity and hope. In 'The Usual Human Disabilities,'' a caretaker for two imperious cerebral palsy sufferers cracks under the pressure of his thankless work and abuses his charges in a warped effort to treat them extra-special. 'The November 15' is a deeply disturbing account of a man broken by arbitrary torture. The stylistically playful if not so readable piece, 'The Worst Degree of Unforgivable,'' details obsessive-compulsive behavior and barely suppressed rage via an 11-page-long single sentence. Montemarano handles brutality and abjection with ambiguity and subtlety while taking assured metafictional leaps. Agent, Jill Grinberg." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)