Fiction
207 Pages
ISBN: 0-910055-87-4
Paper $16.95

The stories in Jonathan Penner's This Is My Voice live on paradox. They are seriously funny and hilariously sad. The characters' overwhelming regularity, their complete and convincing familiarity, is the device by which they become almost unspeakably odd: as though Penner had somehow become both Henry James and Donald Barthelme. In this marvelous collection of fictions, he brings us people of all ages and social circumstances and places them, often, outside of their accustomed contexts so that we see them, as they suddenly see themselves, with stunning vividness.

Jonathan Penner is the author of the novels Going Blind, Natural Order, and The Intelligent Traveler's Guide to Chiribosco, and his previous collection of stories, Private Parties won the Drew Heinz Literature Prize. His stories have appeared in Grand Street, Paris Review, Commentary, Ploughshares, and many other journals. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship to Yugoslavia. Penner teaches fiction writing at the University of Arizona.