Manuel Gonzales is the author of the acclaimed story collection The Miniature Wife, winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. A graduate of the Columbia University Creative Writing Program, he teaches writing at the University of Kentucky and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He has published fiction and nonfiction in Open City, Fence, One Story, Esquire, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and The Believer. Gonzales lives in Kentucky with his wife and two children.

The plot is as explosively paced as a comic book’s, but juggles some dextrous genre shifts. Gonzales fills the workaday office with a glorious plot, giving voice to the John McClane fantasies lying dormant in cubicles across the world. I inhaled this book so quickly that I missed plot points on first read: best to let it wash over you and then marvel in retrospect at the clues you flew past.

Manuel Gonzales is the author of the acclaimed story collection The Miniature Wife, winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. A graduate of the Columbia University Creative Writing Program, he teaches writing at the University of Kentucky and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He has published fiction and nonfiction in Open City, Fence, One Story, Esquire, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and The Believer. Gonzales lives in Kentucky with his wife and two children.

The plot is as explosively paced as a comic book’s, but juggles some dextrous genre shifts. Gonzales fills the workaday office with a glorious plot, giving voice to the John McClane fantasies lying dormant in cubicles across the world. I inhaled this book so quickly that I missed plot points on first read: best to let it wash over you and then marvel in retrospect at the clues you flew past.