Synopses & Reviews
In this collection’s tour-de-force title story, Ethan, a marketing manager for consumer goods brands, finds himself in a bizarre stand-off with his wife, new boss, and daughter’s swim teacher over the sudden presence in his life of Scudder, Ethan’s graffiti-artist nephew. Before long, Ethan is defacing his boss’s office with dry-erase markers and climbing a condemned building in the dead of night. How swiftly, Gianopoulos reminds us, we become the very thing we’re trying to avoid; how soon we find ourselves at the point of no return: a guy whose high school girlfriend has just “asked him to break her leg. Behind the dormitory was a stack of cinderblocks and she told him to drop one on her knee and send her home.”
A love song to the power of the inadvertent and unplanned, this collection tracks a gaggle of lost souls—an anxious medical student; a man jealous of his girlfriend’s love for her tiny Pomeranian; and a restless free-diving housewife–as it captures “that itchy, panicky feeling you get when you suspect you’ve stepped into the slowest line at the supermarket.” Its characters persist in lives pock-marked with awkwardness, continually in search of “another parallel version” of themselves. Amid their domestic mayhem, Gianopoulos finds humor and warmth, an animal curled up around a protagonist’s ankle “like a misplaced comma.” How to Get into Our House and Where We Keep the Money is a witty, telling, urbane exploration of the clumsiness of relationships, of the small wars and gigantic missteps that shape our lives with our nearest and not-always-so-dearest.
Review
“Witty, discerning, and laugh-out-loud funny.” Kirkus Reviews
Review
“… With echoes ranging from Updike to Murakami to Tom Perrotta, and a wonderfully capacious group of characters, Gianopoulos announces himself as a terrific new voice for the form. This is one to read and savor.” Daniel Torday
Review
“...Short story collections rarely arrive this compelling, this accomplished, this imaginative, and this wise. I am already impatient to share this masterful book which I know will convert more and more readers to the joys of the form.” Robin Black
Synopsis
In a bizarre love triangle, a man becomes increasingly desperate for the attention of a woman obsessed with her little dog. A hapless unromantic develops an algorithm to help him succeed at dating. And a divorcee becomes consumed with jealousy when a man she likes begins to date her 60 year old mother. In these tales of love pursued, yet rarely caught, characters find themselves tripping, sometimes painfully, sometimes hilariously, toward self-revelation. Here is life in all of its clumsiness, humor, and beauty.
About the Author
Panio Gianopoulos is the author of the story collection How to Get into Our House and Where We Keep the Money (Four Way Books, 2017) and the novella, A Familiar Beast (Nouvella, 2012), an Amazon Best Book of the Month. His writing has appeared in Tin House, Northwest Review, Salon, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Big Fiction, and elsewhere; he is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for nonfiction literature. He received his B.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his M.B.A. from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Currently the Editorial Director of Heleo, Panio Gianopoulos lives with his family in New York.