Dennis Must

AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR OF HUSH NOW, DON’T EXPLAIN • 2014 USA BEST BOOK AWARD LITERARY FICTION FINALIST • Dennis Must explores the boundaries of reality and myth in his final book in a series, CIRCLING TOWARD NIGHTFALLCircling Toward Nightfall is a lyrical rendering of the myth of blood and duality, an attempt to reconcile the body and innermost self in a search for origins. Jeremiah Coombs, its narrator, may be the only man on earth who has two fathers.

AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR OF HUSH NOW, DON’T EXPLAIN • 2014 USA BEST BOOK AWARD LITERARY FICTION FINALIST • Dennis Must explores the boundaries of reality and myth in his final book in a series, CIRCLING TOWARD NIGHTFALLCircling Toward Nightfall is a lyrical rendering of the myth of blood and duality, an attempt to reconcile the body and innermost self in a search for origins. Jeremiah Coombs, its narrator, may be the only man on earth who has two fathers.

But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from. —William Faulkner, Light in August There is an inexplicable gravity in a small town. It can be read and enjoyed like a favorite book for most of its inhabitants. Comforting are its streets and institutions, its wedding and obituary announcements. Banjo Grease is about life and death in a mill town where at each epiphany and rite of passage, the narrator yields a ration of innocence. Characters portray class as a marker as strong as race and gender, and distrust that they will ever escape in their lifetimes. Faulkner uses the term “eager fatalism.” These stories’ cumulative effect asks: When exchanging naivete for worldliness, what is lost in denying one’s past?

But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from. —William Faulkner, Light in August There is an inexplicable gravity in a small town. It can be read and enjoyed like a favorite book for most of its inhabitants. Comforting are its streets and institutions, its wedding and obituary announcements. Banjo Grease is about life and death in a mill town where at each epiphany and rite of passage, the narrator yields a ration of innocence. Characters portray class as a marker as strong as race and gender, and distrust that they will ever escape in their lifetimes. Faulkner uses the term “eager fatalism.” These stories’ cumulative effect asks: When exchanging naivete for worldliness, what is lost in denying one’s past?

Ethan Mueller, the narrator of Brother Carnival, has suffered a crisis of faith and is on the brink of taking his own life when he is informed by his father that he has an estranged brother who is an author. Whereupon he is handed a collection of his sibling’s stories and novel excerpts and urged to seek him out. “These stories are his effort to find you, Ethan. He’s been where you are now. Seek him out but it won’t be easy.” In effect, “Christopher Daugherty’s” writings function as the protagonist’s brother in absentia, thus creating the “dialogue” and suspenseful interplay between them. By immersing himself in the pieces, Ethan Mueller’s pursuit of his brother is a quest to discover himself.

In Oh, Don't Ask Why, Dennis Must's dark humor and use of jarringly raw language confront a number of anxieties and complexities with which his characters grapple. From overwhelming sorrow to suicidal reflection, this compilation of stories reaches deep into the internal and touches readers to the core.