In this electric on-the-road novel, orphan-hero Matt hitchhikes across the surreal landscape of America in the ‘80s. Searching for the lost bliss of childhood he falls in with—and longs for—the dangerously beautiful but amoral Jimmy, a fellow orphan. As they crisscross the country, encountering homeless rock stars, suicidal teenagers, Jesus freaks, and other souls on the edge, Matt moves toward adulthood and his own sexual identity. Stephen Beachy, awarded a James Michener Grant from the Iowa Writers Workshop, now lives in San Francisco and is at work on another novel.

An enthralling, epic tale of the webs of misinformation that saturate, obscure, and complicate the vagaries of day-to-day life in modern America. It's 2006, and a cloud of darkness seems to have descended over the Earth–or at least over the minds of a ragtag assortment of Bay Area writers, drug dealers, social workers, porn directors, and Melvin, a street kid and refugee from his Mormon family. A shooter runs amok in an Amish schoolhouse, the president runs amok in the Middle East, a child is kidnapped from Disneyland, and on the local literary scene, a former child prostitute and wunderkind author that nobody has ever met has become a media sensation. But something is fishy about this author, Huey Beauregard, and so Melvin and his friends Felicia and Philip launch an investigation into the webs of self-serving stories, lies, rumors, and propaganda that have come to constitute our sad, fractured reality. Glory Hole is a novel about the ravages of time and the varied consequences of a romantic attitude toward literature and life. It is about AIDS, meth, porn, fake biographies, street outreach, the study of Arabic verb forms, Polish transgender modernists, obsession, and future life forms. It's about getting lost in the fog, about prison as both metaphor and reality, madness, evil clowns, and mystical texts. Vast and ambitious, comic and tragic, the novel also serves as a version of the I Ching , meaning it can be used as an oracle.

An enthralling, epic tale of the webs of misinformation that saturate, obscure, and complicate the vagaries of day-to-day life in modern America. It’s 2006, and a cloud of darkness seems to have descended over the Earth—or at least over the minds of a ragtag assortment of Bay Area writers, drug dealers, social workers, porn directors, and Melvin, a street kid and refugee from his Mormon family. A shooter runs amok in an Amish schoolhouse, the president runs amok in the Middle East, a child is kidnapped from Disneyland, and on the local literary scene, a former child prostitute and wunderkind author that nobody has ever met has become a media sensation. But something is fishy about this author, Huey Beauregard, and so Melvin and his friends Felicia and Philip launch an investigation into the webs of self-serving stories, lies, rumors, and propaganda that have come to constitute our sad, fractured reality. Glory Hole is a novel about the ravages of time and the varied consequences of a romantic attitude toward literature and life. It is about AIDS, meth, porn, fake biographies, street outreach, the study of Arabic verb forms, Polish transgender modernists, obsession, and future life forms. It’s about getting lost in the fog, about prison as both metaphor and reality, madness, evil clowns, and mystical texts. Vast and ambitious, comic and tragic, the novel also serves as a version of the I Ching, meaning it can be used as an oracle.

In this unusual “collaborative novel,” Jake Yoder, a precocious boy caught between Amish culture and the modern world, sits in his middle-school classroom writing stories at the behest of a stern but charismatic teacher. Jake''s stories feature children who are crushed, imprisoned, and distorted, and yet somehow flailing around with a kind of bedazzled awe, trying to find a way out. His characters wander through Amish farms, one-room schoolhouses, South American plains, mental institutions, exotic cities, and prisons; his sentences seem constructed to the beat of an obsessive internal rhythm, and his prose is often haunting and beautiful. The strange logic and disturbing shifts in Jake’s tales reveal a young boy processing intense emotional experiences in the wake of his mother''s suicide and his own proximity to the schoolroom shootings at Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, in 2006. Jake imagines fantastic journeys, magical transformations, and rock stardom as alternatives, it seems, to his own grim reality and the limitations of his life among the Amish. Novelist Stephen Beachy frames Jake''s work with commentary from both himself and editor Judith Owsley Brown, in which they offer their very different views on Amish culture, literary context, the use of psychoactive medications for children, Stephen''s own mental health, and the reality of Jake Yoder''s unverified existence.

A pair of novellas, lyrical, haunting, and bleak, that offer an unsparing yet emotionally rich vision of contemporary America. In Some Phantom an unnamed woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing a violent relationship. She begins to explore the city and its inhabitants and takes a job teaching disturbed children, but finds her own mental stability becoming more and more precarious. A marriage of The Turn of the Screw and Carnival of Souls, Some Phantom poses questions about the line between memory and madness, between fantasy and abuse. These questions are further elaborated in No Time Flat, which follows Wade, a boy living a somewhat isolated existence with his elderly parents on the American plains, as he makes his way through a childhood marked by playground shootings and mysterious strangers. Wade then becomes a wanderer himself, inhabiting a sparse landscape of fleeting connections, lost children, and unformulated crimes.

In this electric on-the-road novel, orphan-hero Matt hitchhikes across the surreal landscape of America in the ‘80s. Searching for the lost bliss of childhood he falls in with—and longs for—the dangerously beautiful but amoral Jimmy, a fellow orphan. As they crisscross the country, encountering homeless rock stars, suicidal teenagers, Jesus freaks, and other souls on the edge, Matt moves toward adulthood and his own sexual identity. Stephen Beachy, awarded a James Michener Grant from the Iowa Writers Workshop, now lives in San Francisco and is at work on another novel.

An enthralling, epic tale of the webs of misinformation that saturate, obscure, and complicate the vagaries of day-to-day life in modern America. It's 2006, and a cloud of darkness seems to have descended over the Earth–or at least over the minds of a ragtag assortment of Bay Area writers, drug dealers, social workers, porn directors, and Melvin, a street kid and refugee from his Mormon family. A shooter runs amok in an Amish schoolhouse, the president runs amok in the Middle East, a child is kidnapped from Disneyland, and on the local literary scene, a former child prostitute and wunderkind author that nobody has ever met has become a media sensation. But something is fishy about this author, Huey Beauregard, and so Melvin and his friends Felicia and Philip launch an investigation into the webs of self-serving stories, lies, rumors, and propaganda that have come to constitute our sad, fractured reality. Glory Hole is a novel about the ravages of time and the varied consequences of a romantic attitude toward literature and life. It is about AIDS, meth, porn, fake biographies, street outreach, the study of Arabic verb forms, Polish transgender modernists, obsession, and future life forms. It's about getting lost in the fog, about prison as both metaphor and reality, madness, evil clowns, and mystical texts. Vast and ambitious, comic and tragic, the novel also serves as a version of the I Ching , meaning it can be used as an oracle.

An enthralling, epic tale of the webs of misinformation that saturate, obscure, and complicate the vagaries of day-to-day life in modern America. It’s 2006, and a cloud of darkness seems to have descended over the Earth—or at least over the minds of a ragtag assortment of Bay Area writers, drug dealers, social workers, porn directors, and Melvin, a street kid and refugee from his Mormon family. A shooter runs amok in an Amish schoolhouse, the president runs amok in the Middle East, a child is kidnapped from Disneyland, and on the local literary scene, a former child prostitute and wunderkind author that nobody has ever met has become a media sensation. But something is fishy about this author, Huey Beauregard, and so Melvin and his friends Felicia and Philip launch an investigation into the webs of self-serving stories, lies, rumors, and propaganda that have come to constitute our sad, fractured reality. Glory Hole is a novel about the ravages of time and the varied consequences of a romantic attitude toward literature and life. It is about AIDS, meth, porn, fake biographies, street outreach, the study of Arabic verb forms, Polish transgender modernists, obsession, and future life forms. It’s about getting lost in the fog, about prison as both metaphor and reality, madness, evil clowns, and mystical texts. Vast and ambitious, comic and tragic, the novel also serves as a version of the I Ching, meaning it can be used as an oracle.

In this unusual “collaborative novel,” Jake Yoder, a precocious boy caught between Amish culture and the modern world, sits in his middle-school classroom writing stories at the behest of a stern but charismatic teacher. Jake''s stories feature children who are crushed, imprisoned, and distorted, and yet somehow flailing around with a kind of bedazzled awe, trying to find a way out. His characters wander through Amish farms, one-room schoolhouses, South American plains, mental institutions, exotic cities, and prisons; his sentences seem constructed to the beat of an obsessive internal rhythm, and his prose is often haunting and beautiful. The strange logic and disturbing shifts in Jake’s tales reveal a young boy processing intense emotional experiences in the wake of his mother''s suicide and his own proximity to the schoolroom shootings at Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, in 2006. Jake imagines fantastic journeys, magical transformations, and rock stardom as alternatives, it seems, to his own grim reality and the limitations of his life among the Amish. Novelist Stephen Beachy frames Jake''s work with commentary from both himself and editor Judith Owsley Brown, in which they offer their very different views on Amish culture, literary context, the use of psychoactive medications for children, Stephen''s own mental health, and the reality of Jake Yoder''s unverified existence.

A pair of novellas, lyrical, haunting, and bleak, that offer an unsparing yet emotionally rich vision of contemporary America. In Some Phantom an unnamed woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing a violent relationship. She begins to explore the city and its inhabitants and takes a job teaching disturbed children, but finds her own mental stability becoming more and more precarious. A marriage of The Turn of the Screw and Carnival of Souls, Some Phantom poses questions about the line between memory and madness, between fantasy and abuse. These questions are further elaborated in No Time Flat, which follows Wade, a boy living a somewhat isolated existence with his elderly parents on the American plains, as he makes his way through a childhood marked by playground shootings and mysterious strangers. Wade then becomes a wanderer himself, inhabiting a sparse landscape of fleeting connections, lost children, and unformulated crimes.