writing — Christopher Chambers

books

$24.95 | November 2022 | 220 pp
Paperback | 979-8986144726

Kind of Blue

The stories in Kind of Blue juke and jive in an unpredictable voice-driven romp. Set in rural Wisconsin, Minneapolis, Duluth, Milwaukee, Detroit, New Orleans, Houston, and South Florida, these are stories that start and stop and surprise, swerving all over the road. These are stories of wanderlust and music, loss and misdirection, disasters large and small. With the sound and rhythm of language driving each tale, Christopher Chambers gives voice to the working- and middle-class worlds of the American Midwest and the South.

To pre-order until November 16th (at a 20% discount), email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Order directly from the press via email or phone: -40% discount to the trade, fully returnable, free shipping up to 10 copies in the US

Praise for Kind of Blue

“I finished it feeling as if the man had left little pieces of his soul on every page, and I swear to God I lost count of the number of sentences I wish I had written.” —Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and The Heavenly Table

“Chambers accomplishes what only the best writers can; he makes every character feel both universal and unique, each setting both a vacation and a return home.” —M.O. Walsh, New York Times bestselling author of My Sunshine Away and The Big Door Prize

Delta 88 (Split Oak Press, 2013), selected by Donald Ray Pollock as winner of the 2011 Split Oak Press Flash Prose Contest. It's available here in a print edition, and from Greencup Books in an unlimited eBook edition.

"In these stone-whetted and machete-whittled sting fictions, Christopher Chambers forges, from the idioms of stamped enameled steel and patina-pocked chrome, the narrative poetry of hard-knocked goddamned gorgeous vernacular. In Delta 88, he bondos the new noir southern gothic gloss with the crystal methods of the rust-belt’s rusty rust. These silvered, slivered fictions do the voodoo of microsurgery, opening up the four-barreled carb, the congested knocking chambers of the clouded engine blocked heart." —Michael Martone

"These shorts are spare on words, but not on heart and insight. Chambers’ writing does what good writing should do: offer us characters who remind us of who we’ve forgotten we are. The men in Delta 88 are rendered with a tender, brutal honesty, and what a pleasure it is to see their quiet, brilliant failures unfold before us so much like our own lives." —Jennifer S. Davis

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anthologies

“Labor Day, 1989,” Contours: New and Collected Work, (The Driftless Writing Center, 2020)

“Highway 61 Revisited Again, or, Gone South: Creating Place in the Twenty-First Century” North-South: Essays on Gender, Race, and Region (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012)

“O Happy Living Things” in Something in the Water (Portals Press, 2011)

“Dear Maddox” in Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox (Xavier Review Press, 2007)

“Hemispheres” in Maple Street Rag III (Portals Press, 2007)

“Carl, Under His Car” in Tartts II (Livingston Press, 2006)

“Pelican & Verrett” in Intersection / New Orleans (Press Street, 2006)

“Tattoo” in Knoxville Bound (Metro Pulse Publishing, 2004)

“Aardvark to Aztec” in Best American Mystery Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)

“Summertime” French Quarter Fiction (Light of New Orleans Publishing, 2003)

“The Bicycle at the Bridge” The International Anthology of Hypertext (SUNY Press, 2004)