Quality Snacks
by Andy Mozina
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Pub Date May 01 2014 | Archive Date Apr 16 2014
Wayne State University Press | JKSCommunications.com
Description
In a wide range of forms and tones, the fifteen stories in Andy Mozina's new collection,Quality Snacks, center on high-stakes performances by characters trying to gratify both deep and superficial needs, often with unexpected consequences. Driven by strange ambitions, bungled love, and a taste for-or abject fear of-physical danger, the collection's characters enact the paradox in the concept of a quality snack: the dream of transmuting the mundane into something extraordinary.
Two teenage boys play chicken on a Milwaukee freeway. A man experiencing a career crisis watches a seventy-four-year-old great grandmother perform an aerial acrobatics routine at the top of a swaying 110-foot pole. Desperate to find a full-time job, a pizza delivery man is fooled into a humiliating sexual demonstration by a couple at a Midway Motor Lodge. A troubled young man tries to end his father's verbal harassment by successfully hunting a polar bear. After an elf civil war destroys his Christmas operation, Santa Claus reinvents himself as a one-man baseball team and ends up desperate to win a single game. And in the title story, a flavor engineer at Frito-Lay tries to win his boss's heart with a new strategy for Doritos that aims to reposition the brand from snack food to main course.
While some stories embrace pathos and some are humorous and some are realistic and some contain surreal elements, all of the stories in Quality Snacks share striking insight and a cast of compelling, well-conceived characters. This collection, in an earlier form, has been a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award, the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, the Elixir Press Fiction Award, and the Autumn House Fiction Contest, and a semi-finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize. Readers of fiction will be satisfied by the variety of fare offered by Quality Snacks.
Advance Praise
“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”
“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”
Marketing Plan
Full Publicity Campaign including Media/Online Promotions, Physical and Virtual Book Tours
For more information and/or questions, please contact Samantha@JKSCommunications.com
Full Publicity Campaign including Media/Online Promotions, Physical and Virtual Book Tours
For more information and/or questions, please contact Samantha@JKSCommunications.com
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9780814340158 |
| PRICE | $18.99 (USD) |
Average rating from 9 members
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