Synopses & Reviews
Rick DeMarinis possesses a power and an originality unique in contemporary American fiction. The Coming Triumph of the Free World, his second story collection, puts his flamboyant gifts on display: an amazing verbal energy, a blackly comic vision of the world as an immense booby trap, and a technical virtuosity that modulates from down-and-dirty realism to fractured fable to surreal and searing visions of madness.
Review
"Compelling, incendiary concoctions . . . the kind of collection lesser writers yearn to create and readers long to return to." Denise Gess
Review
"DeMarinis is a contemporary avatar of that tradition in American short story writing that, by way of Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, O'Connor, Welty and Cheever, is essentially religious and, because rooted in the everyday, comic. . . . His art, then, is comedy of a very high order." Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
"These tales imply a chilly, brilliantly lit world on the brink of absolute darkness, chronicled with speedy, black-hearted élan." Russell Banks New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
"DeMarinis is a wizard shaking to its literary roots the short-story genre."--Matthew Gilbert, Boston Globe
About the Author
Rick DeMarinis is a novelist and short story writer. He has taught at the University of Montana, San Diego State University, Arizona State University, and the University of Texas at El Paso. His stories have appeared in Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, GQ, The Paris Review, and The Iowa Review.