Kevin Moffett

Florida, 1982. A nine-year-old watches as his dead father's possessions are hauled away: his clothes and tools, his faux-leather recliner. His sensei says it's a perfect time to turn his weaknesses into weapons. His PE teacher says he runs like a pregnant ostrich. His mother takes out a personal ad. Everyone is trying to teach him a lesson but he is, it seems, a slow learner. Meanwhile, with each passing day, his father recedes, growing less and less plausible, almost a myth. Twenty-five years later, adrift in suburban Southern California, married with a son of his own, he's still trying to sort through the fragments of his father's death while imparting his own sketchy education onto his son. Which snakes are poisonous? Why did I tell him that Candyland is based on a true story? Why has he stopped asking me to go skateboarding with him and his friends? After discovering a travel journal he didn't know his father kept, he and his son light out on a road trip, retracing the father's mystifying journey. They drive up the Pacific Coast, foggy, overtaken by beauty. As he strains to decipher his father's notes, his relationship with his son begins to take on new heft and shape. With wit and compassion, Moffett delivers a bracingly intimate account of fatherhood, and discovery, and the experiences of two men far from home.

A generation of children are born without speech, without comprehension, without language entirely. Parents, doctors, opportunist inventors, cult leaders, and vigilantes, recall what they have endured and what they have inflicted on others.

Both a bold storytelling experiment and a propulsive reading experience, Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, and Kevin Moffett's The Silent History is at once thrilling, timely, and timeless. A generation of children forced to live without words. It begins as a statistical oddity: a spike in children born with acute speech delays. Physically normal in every way, these children never speak and do not respond to speech; they don't learn to read, don't learn to write. As the number of cases grows to an epidemic level, theories spread. Maybe it's related to a popular antidepressant; maybe it's environmental. Or maybe these children have special skills all their own. The Silent History unfolds in a series of brief testimonials from parents, teachers, friends, doctors, cult leaders, profiteers, and impostors (everyone except, of course, the children themselves), documenting the growth of the so-called silent community into an elusive, enigmatic force in itself--alluring to some, threatening to others.

A dazzling new story collection from brilliant, young, award-winning writer Kevin Moffett, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events illuminates the intimate experiences of characters caught between aspiration and achievement, uncertainty and illumination, inertia and discovery, the past and the future. Channeling unexpected, eclectic voices in a collection perfectly suited to readers of Daniyal Mueenuddin, Alice Sebold, and Dave Eggers, Moffett delivers a nuanced, powerful, humorous, and moving meditation on the trials of transitions and liminal living in today's modern world. Richard Russo says, "the first thing you notice reading the stories in Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events is the author's extraordinary range--of expertise, technique, imagination and wit. There doesn't seem to be much Kevin Moffett can't do."

Settled amid the seasonal amusements and condominium-lined beaches of the Florida coast, the characters who inhabit Kevin Moffett's award-winning stories reach out of their lives to find that something unexpected and mysterious has replaced what used to be familiar. Some are stalled in the present, alone or lonely, bemused by mortality and disappointment. Some move toward the future heartened by what they learn from those around them - a tattoo artist, an invented medicine man, zoo animals, strangers, fellow outsiders. Deftly rendered, these stories abound with oddness and grace. In ""Tattooizm,"" included in ""The Best American Short Stories 2006"", a young woman struggles with a promise that her boyfriend is determined to make her keep. In the Nelson Algren Award-winning ""Space,"" a reluctantly undertaken errand forces a young man to finally confront the death of his mother. And in ""The Medicine Man,"" hailed by the Times (U.K.) as ""perfectly pitched and perfectly written,"" a man recounts his manic attachment to his sister. Moffett's closely observed stories are candid and complex, funny and moving. The world of ""Permanent Visitors"" is an idiosyncratic and generous one, its inhabitants searching for constancy in a place crowded with contradiction.