Hicksters

'What a singular voice! It's like Lorrie Moore and Barry Hannah had a love child and left him in the woods to be raised by wolves - and Denis Johnson' JAMIE QUATRO, author of Two-Step Devil 'Written in language at once visceral and electric, Maynard's big-hearted stories are as unflinching as they are funny. I'd follow any first page of his anywhere' ADAM ROSS, author of Playworld 'Hell yes to this exceptional collection of ferocious dispatches from an America that mostly gets flown over, talked over, stripped for parts, and then ignored until there's something to blame it for . . . Hicksters is feral, foul, great-hearted, unflinching, and true' JUSTIN TAYLOR, author of Reboot 'Hicksters is singular and spectacular . . . an honest, gritty, and intimate view of a place and its people, their decline and resilience, pathos and pride, softness and steel core . . . entertaining, heartbreaking, down-to-earth, needle-sharp, wild, and wildly funny' LAUREN ACAMPORA author of The Animal Room 'Rough and tender stories -- the wild kind you hear after everyone else at the party has stumbled off to sleep' BUD SMITH, author of Teenager 'When the stories in Hicksters weren't breaking my heart, they were crackling me up. Maynard's collection is both gritty and sly, and best of all, really fun to read . . . A terrific storyteller, and a shrewd observer of Rust Belt life in all its absurdity' KEN JAWOROWSKI, Edgar nominated author of Small Town Sins McKean County, Pennsylvania is the setting for Jake Maynard's audacious collection of linked short stories. Once the oil capital of the world, all that's left to show for it now is a single pump-jack, rocking like a drinking bird next to a McDonald's drive-thru. Every few years, a liberal news outlet comes to do a story, each time finding a new angle for what that pump-jack says about the area and its people. But to the locals, it's just an oil well in a parking lot. They have more material concerns.