Jerry Gabriel – författare

The winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Towson Prize for Literature. “Exquisite storytelling” from the author of The Let Go (Foreword Reviews).   Jerry Gabriel delivers an unsentimental portrait of rural America in Drowned Boy, a collection of linked stories that reveals a world of brutality, beauty, and danger in the forgotten landscape of small-town basketball tournaments and family reunions. In “Boys Industrial School,” two brothers track an escaped juvenile convict, while in the titular novella, a young man and woman embark on a haphazard journey to find meaning in the death of a high-school classmate. These stories probe the fraught cusp of adulthood, the frustrations of escape and difference, and the emotional territory of disappointment—set in the hardscrabble borderlands where Appalachia meets the Midwest.   “Eight linked stories, set among boys and men in southern Ohio, have the masculine virtues of honest craft and plain, carefully chosen language . . . Writing that sticks with the reader much longer than showier fiction.” —The Plain Dealer   “A nuanced and complicated examination of the way grief is contagious, sparking dark emotions in people who initially are barely affected.” —Time Out Chicago   “In prose as spare and enchanting as the town’s landscape, Gabriel paints a beautiful and sobering portrait of Middle Americans trapped in a world of snow, ice, and inevitability.” —Booklist

An immersive adventure story set during the American Civil War follows four travelers as they escape toward the Western territories.It is fall 1864, and Robert Riley has deserted his Army of the Potomac unit outside Petersburg, Virginia. Exhausted from years of war and worried about his motherless sons in Ohio, he returns to collect thirteen-year-old Michael and Sean, three years older, and flees to the Western territories. Along the way, he encounters Janey, an orphan at sixteen, who is also eager to go West. When Riley sees in her a quickness of mind, a brand of cunning that mirrors his own, he is persuaded to take her along.Crossing the lower Midwest on horseback with little money and few possessions, the four are pursued by a wily private detective after the reward for turning in Riley. He manages to thwart the ragtag group, who abandon their plan of crossing the plains. They slip away by train to Chicago, and there, in that cold, stinking, dangerous metropolis, just before the 1864 election, they meet with problems beyond Riley’s ability to resolve. All four find themselves alone, at the mercy of fortune . . . and the fortune hunter, who finally gets the chance to face down his nemesis.Deserters alternates between the perspectives of the four major characters as their relationships grow and shift, and as each of them strives to forge their way forward in the late war’s murky upheaval. A book whose antecedents include Charles Portis’s True Grit and Paulette Jiles’s News of the World, Gabriel’s immersive novel is an adventure story with psychological intricacy, emotional intensity, and historical heft.