Publishers Weekly has praised Gerald Duff’s fiction for “wit and subtlety as simply satisfying as a tall cold one on a hot Gulf Coast afternoon.” NewSouth has a great selection of Duff’s books in print — and now as ebooks, too! Enjoy Duff’s novel Coasters, his collection of short stories, Fire Ants, and his new ebook “short,” Fugitive Days, all as ebooks, available for all major e-readers and devices.
In addition, each of Duff’s stories from Fire Ants are available as individual ebooks for only $0.99. This includes the title story, “Fire Ants,” which won the Cohen Prize from Ploughshares Magazine, was cited in Best American Short Stories, and republished in The Editors’ Choice: New American Stories. This is a great way to check out Duff’s fiction — we know you’ll be hooked.
Duff’s first short story collection, Fire Ants and Other Stories, ranges in settings from the marshes and pine barrens of East Texas to the row houses of Baltimore, and in time from the Civil War to the present day. Each story conjures portraits of people captive to private delusions and bound to visions of what might be or might have been, struggling for escape and redemption. Highly comic and deeply serious, the stories collected in Fire Ants are perfect gems for reading individually or all together.
Fire Ants‘s stories include:
* The Angler’s Paradise Fish-Cabin Dance of Love
* The Apple and the Aspirin Tablet
* The Way a Blind Man Tracks Light
Coasters follows Waylon McPhee, middle-aged and divorced, who moves back in with his widowed father. But even Waylon’s father is dating again, and the pressures on Waylon are great enough that he might not be able to just coast through another year. Humorous and melancholy, Gerald Duff’s Coasters perfectly presents the ennui of contemporary life in the suburbs of the petroleum-chemical corridor that stretches along the Gulf Coast from Texas to Mississippi.
In Fugitive Days, Duff recalls chance encounters with such literary figures as Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Andrew Lytle. In his meetings with the poets, Duff finds the humanity in each — some approachable, some remote, some lost in the wilds of age or overshadowed by their own legends. Duff and his readers take away with them new understanding of what writers-as-fugitives gain and sacrifice in pursuit of their craft. Poems.com named Fugitive Days one of their their “Prose Pieces of the Week.”
Learn more about Gerald Duff on his official website or on his author page from NewSouth Books.