About the Book
“Andy Mozina is a magician. I can’t think of a species of masculine folly—whether guilty rebellion, or panicky narcissism, or dependency disguised as tyranny, or anomie passing as glib enthusiasm for new lines of an employer’s tortilla chips—whose vocabulary and broken inner self Andy Mozina has not deftly conjured up for this collection. And he is as funny as he is wise.”
—Jaimy Gordon, National Book Award–winning author of Lord of Misrule
“Andy Mozina’s dark comic midwestern genius thrills and troubles me, and I want more of it. Each of these stories is a philosophical puzzle, and each is a strange adventure to the foreign land that is another person’s mind. Through his plainspoken narrators, Mozina takes us farther than we meant to go—to the edge of the Arctic Ocean, to Elvis’s bedroom, to the terrible confusion at the heart of every human relationship. I love this collection.”
—Bonnie Jo Campbell, bestselling author of Once Upon a River and National Book Award finalist for American Salvage (Wayne State University Press, 2009)
“Andy Mozina’s Quality Snacks is a collection of sad Rust Belt love songs. He maps a territory of dispirited office workers and aging small town beauties, all of them already beaten, always on the verge of worse. Echoes of Vonnegut, Borges, Cheever, and Saunders converge in these strip mall parking lots, in these dimly lit motels. Mozina asserts himself here as the fabulist poet of the Great Lakes working stiff.”
—Tony D’Souza, author of Whiteman and Mule
“It’s a powerful effect, to wedge the sad into the funny, the strange into the normal in order to split a character (or world) apart, and it’s one that I’m fond of. The oddness and commitment to the internal logic of these stories cements it: Mozina’s creating his own worlds, in the same circles, maybe, as George Saunders’ or Brock Clarke’s, but distinctly his own.”
—Ander Monson, editor of the literary magazine DIAGRAM and author of Vanishing Point
Fiction
May 2014
Paperback, ISBN 978-0-8143-4015-8
eBook, ISBN 978-0-8143-4016-5 Made in Michigan Writers Series
Cover design by Sharp Designs
Wayne State University Press
Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309
Available from Wayne State University Press and Amazon.
About the Author
Ink, paper, dark humor and a dash of cynicism is short story writer Andy Mozina’s secret recipe for his newest collection, “Quality Snacks” (May 1, Wayne State University Press).
“Quality Snacks” has already made some waves. The short story collection was a semi-finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction (2011) and finalist for multiple honors including the Elixir Press Fiction Award (2012), Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest (2012), Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award (2011) and the Autumn House Fiction Contest (2011).
Mozina grew up in Brookfield, Wisc., a suburb of Milwaukee. He studied economics at Northwestern University and later attended Harvard Law School for a year. He earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Boston University. He moved to St. Louis where he completed a doctorate in English literature at Washington University. Finally, after graduate school, he moved to Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1999 to teach literature and creative writing at Kalamazoo College.
Mozina’s first collection, “The Women Were Leaving the Men” (2007, Wayne State University Press), is the winner of the 2008 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Fiction and a 2008 finalist for the Glassgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. He is also the author of “Joseph Conrad and the Art of Sacrifice” (2001, Routledge).
Mozina has published fiction in Tin House, Ecotone, Fence, The Southern Review and Missouri Review. He has been interviewed about his work on public radio stations in Kalamazoo and Milwaukee.
Mozina lives in Michigan with his wife, Lorri, and daughter Madeleine.
Author Links
BOOK GIVEAWAY!!!!
How would you like to win an e-book of Quality Snacks by Andy Mozina? Thanks to Samantha at JKS Communications, I have one e-book to giveaway to one lucky winner.
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The giveaway begins on May 18th (midnight est) and ends on May 25th (midnight est).
The winner will be chosen randomly by Rafflecopter. The winner will be notified by email and has 48 hours to respond, otherwise a new winner will be chosen. I will announce the winner here on my blog.
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a Rafflecopter giveaway
Sounds like a good collection - and one I'd want to take my time reading.
ReplyDeleteI like the sound of this - beginning with the title.
ReplyDeleteSound like an interesting read.
ReplyDelete