Erin Flanagan – författare

“It’s not going to kill you,” a mother tells her protesting child. And maybe it won’t, but that doesn’t mean anyone is getting off scot-free. A no-man's-land between exoneration and repercussion, this is the place where the people in Erin Flanagan’s stories live: in events as big as 9/11 and as small as an infatuation with a dog groomer, as meaningful as the birth of a baby and as senseless as a car crash, as unique as a 1980s air band living out dreams for a city in decline and as common as an afterschool job that sucks. These stories accept that we all make mistakes, but it’s what we do in the aftermath that defines us.Sharp-witted and tenderhearted, these are stories in which readers will find people they recognize but never really knew until now.

Although the characters in these stories may be the usual suspects, making the usual mistakes, their stories are anything but the usual fare. Populated by pretenders, ex-cons, and wannabes who bend the rules, break the law, and risk everything to salvage their own hearts, the twelve stories in The Usual Mistakes conduct readers into a world where betrayal is just a beginning. Deception, infidelity, even death—where a person goes from there is the mainspring of Erin Flanagan's fiction, and in the turns her characters take, we find rare insights: that we are often wedded to one another because of, not in spite of, our flaws and that this paradoxical connection may in fact be cause for hope.An impostor medical assistant and an ex-neo-Nazi, covered head to toe in swastika tattoos; a seemingly oafish but suddenly sympathetic husband and a boorish mother-in-law in need of comforting; a young boy who finds adulthood by learning to forgive—the characters in these stories are by turns inappropriate, outlandish, selfish, and kind and are complicated as only real people are.

Winner of the 2022 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First NovelIt’s the opening weekend of deer season in Gunthrum, Nebraska, in 1985, and Alma Costagan’s intellectually disabled farmhand, Hal Bullard, has gone hunting with some of the locals, leaving her in a huff. That same weekend, a teenage girl goes missing, and Hal returns with a flimsy story about the blood in his truck and a dent near the headlight. When the situation escalates from that of a missing girl to something more sinister, Alma and her husband are forced to confront what Hal might be capable of, as rumors fly and townspeople see Hal’s violent past in a new light.A drama about the complicated relationships connecting the residents of a small-town farming community, Deer Season explores troubling questions about how far people will go to safeguard the ones they love and what it means to be a family.