Sunday, May 18, 2014

Blog Tour: Quality Snacks by Andy Mozina (Spotlight/E-Book Giveaway)





About the Book

“Andy Mozina is a magician. I can’t think of a species of masculine follywhether guilty rebellion, or panicky narcissism, or dependency disguised as tyranny, or anomie passing as glib enthusiasm for new lines of an employer’s tortilla chipswhose 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

Driven by strange ambitions, bungled love, and a taste for—or abject fear of—physical danger, the characters in this collection enact the paradox in the concept of a quality snack: the dream of transmuting the mundane into something extraordinary. Andy Mozina depicts high-stakes performances to gratify both deep and superficial needs: A man experiencing a career crisis watches a seventy-four-year-old great grandmother perform aerial acrobatics at the top of a swaying 110-foot pole. A troubled young man tries to end his father’s verbal harassment by successfully hunting a polar bear. Desperate to find a full-time job, a pizza deliveryman is fooled into a humiliating sexual demonstration by a couple at a Midway Motor Lodge. And in the title story, a flavor engineer at Frito-Lay tries to win his boss’s heart with his strategy to reposition Doritos from snack food to main course.

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.

Just a few simple rules...

1) You must fill out the rafflecopter form below.

2) Contest is open to anyone over 18 years old

3) For one extra entry: Tweet about this giveaway.

4) For one extra entry: Leave a comment for the author.

5) For one extra entry:  Follow this blog...old followers, too!  Just let us know how you follow and under what name.

No purchase necessary.  Void where prohibited.

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.

Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

4 comments:

  1. Sounds like a good collection - and one I'd want to take my time reading.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This sounds like such an interesting book!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I like the sound of this - beginning with the title.

    ReplyDelete

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