Fiction: 5.3x8.5 
192 Pages, .................                  
ISBN-10:1-59766-033-7    
ISBN-13: 978-1-59766-033-4      
Paper: $14.95

The beautiful linked stories in Joseph Bathanti's award-winning collection The High Heart bring us an ensemble of heartbreakingly vivid characters, headed by the young Fritz Sweeny and his volatile and eccentric parents.

The setting is Pittsburgh in the sixties and seventies, when the city still lay in the trough of industrial collapse. Through the painfully honest perplexity of Fritz, we are afforded a clear view of the family, the neighborhood, the city, and the era.

Joseph Bathanti grew up in Pittsburgh and came back to North Carolina in 1976 as a VISTA volunteer to work in the state's prison system. He is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which, This Metal, was nominated for the National Book Award, as well as two novels, East Liberty and Coventry, for which he received the 2006 Novello Literary Award. The recipient of numerous other honors, among them the Linda Flowers Prize, the Sara Henderson Hay Prize, and the Sherwood Anderson Award, he teaches creative writing at Appalachian State University.

"The High Heart is a gripping, soulful collection of linked stories...The main characters are indelible-the young protagonist, Fritz, his passive-but-sweet father, Travis, and his explosive mother, Rita, whose dark sexuality and dissatisfaction loom like storm clouds over these stories. The writing can be fierce, funny, and touching...The High Heart satisfies that mysterious quality of great fiction by managing to be both truthful and artful at the same time."

—Jess Walter, author of The Zero and final judge for the 2006 Spokane Prize

"Joseph Bathanti's The High Heart pulls us in with an urgency that never lets up, imbuing his own little corner of urban America with the same kind of mythic hyperreality as William Kennedy's Albany novels or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County."

  —Nino Ricci, author of Testament

"I wish I could write like Joseph Bathanti. Sentence by sentence, scene by scene—these characters' lives reveal themselves in all their quirky, dysfunctional, comic, tragic complexity and high-quality detail. This is an author who loves his characters, even the worst of them, and because of this I love them too and will never forget them."

—Lewis Nordan, author of Lightning Song and Boy with Loaded Gun

"In this beautifully written and deeply moving collection of linked short stories, Joseph Bathanti gives us all the sad trappings of working-class life—the Rolling Rock beer, the Pall Mall cigarettes, the plastic lawn chairs, the beat-up Bonnevilles and Impalas. Yet the world of The High Heart never feels depressing. It's impossible not to cheer on young Fritzy as he struggles to make sense of his eccentric parents, the ever-bickering, memorable couple known as Travis-and-Rita." 

—Rita Ciresi, author of Pink Slip and Sometimes I Dream in Italian