Excommunicados

“There would be enough pleasure in Excommunicados if Charles Haverty’s formally elegant stories were merely perfectly crafted and observed, plus funny, and also quietly sad, not to mention so various in subject matter. They are all that in addition to being page-turners, each one. They made me happy.” — Jane Hamilton, author, A Map of the World

“Charles Haverty is a beautifully balanced writer with a fine ear for prose and an intuitive-feeling grasp of the dynamics of human conflict and reconciliation. He gets how the real human dramas unfold over time and often as not reveal themselves through hairline cracks becoming fissures. He is both accurate and wise.” —Sven Birkerts, author, The Gutenberg Elegies

“Charles Haverty drives right into the heart of the storm—storms of doubt, storms of anger, storms of perverse desire, storms of regret. Here are stories that ask enormous questions about faith and doubt, love and death, justice and forgiveness, questions that are always anchored to real human characters in a gorgeouslyrendered physical reality. I loved the pointillist precision of Haverty’s descriptions: ‘sudsy’ flowers cover caskets, telephone receivers smell like ‘cigarettes and Juicy Fruit,’ pink salt flies through red taillights. You might hear echoes of Jesus’ Son and Flannery O’Connor and Bruce Springsteen and the Book of Ecclesiastes, but these tales belong to Haverty. His scenes are charged with emotion and wonderfully, discomfitingly true to life, whether they unfold inside a Catholic church or a couple’s bedroom. Haverty blurs the sacred and the profane, with plenty of jokes in between. (A father admits to his son at a destination wedding: ‘I know I’m the last resort at this resort.’) Haverty does a beautiful job of revealing how the present moment is always haunted by past and future. In every one of his artful stories, you’ll hear ‘the ghost of another conversation bleeding through the wires.’”—Karen Russell, judge, 2015 John Simmons Short Fiction Award