Fire Year - (Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction) by Jason K Friedman (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>Gay and Jewish men struggle to navigate conservative communities in Georgia and the Deep South.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br>Jason K. Friedman investigates art, sexuality, love, and religion in seven unconventional and engrossing short stories. A gay man attends his high school reunion in Savannah, where he's pursued by the now-married former football star. An awkward teenager grapples with notions of God and girls at his bar mitzvah. A curator's assistant struggles to understand a five hundred-year-old Italian painter's body of work, until his boyfriend (whom he's previously written off as frivolous), makes an accidental discovery that challenges decades of art criticism. A moving picture of the trials religious, cultural, and sexual minorities experience in Georgia and the Deep South.<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>These seven funny, fearless outsiders' tales set in Savannah and Atlanta--sometimes depicting bygone orthodox Jewish communities, others the rife-with-irony New South--gravitate toward taboo. One preoccupation of Friedman's Mary McCarthy Prize-winning debut collection is the breakdown of traditional mores, but its standouts specifically tackle pent-up sexual desire.... Strengthened by the diversity in subject matter, the through-line of sexual coming-of-age and temptation gives this volume a satisfying coherence.<br>--<i>Publishers Weekly</i>, Starred Review <p/>Loneliness predictably attends these people on the fringes, yet sometimes Mr. Friedman craftily reverses the polarity of acceptance and rejection. . . . There can also be loneliness in inclusion, Mr. Friedman suggests, when it resembles exploitation.<br>--<i>The Wall Street Journal</i> <p/>Friedman has assembled a memorable posse of misfits in his debut collection. . . . Friedman works in that same O'Connor-Welty tradition, and in light of 2013's Nobel Prize going to short story writer Munro in recognition of a life's opus, I am thrilled for this new voice to join the genre with <i>Fire Year</i>.<br>--<i>The LA Review of Books</i> <p/>Friedman's adept first story collection, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize, evokes several weighty themes--religion, sexuality, coming-of-age--while remaining grounded in the everyday culture and communities of its characters, many of whom find themselves on the outside looking in. . . . In a collection that marks its own territory, Friedman's seven tales offer a compelling exploration into shifting social norms.<br>--<i>Booklist</i> <p/>The seven stories in Jason K. Friedman's rich, funny and finally very moving debut all feature characters who feel like transplants in a strange land, even though often enough it's a land to which they were born.<br>--<i>Towleroad</i> <p/>Friedman writes with an air of post-modern irony yet remains fully sympathetic to the characters who people his stories as they fumble toward irresolution.... In this Isaac Bashevis Singer-like take on the Jewish experience in the American South, with humor set against despair, Friedman writes with a gift for language, employing words and phrases quietly. The characters are real and diamond-sharp, but observing from the outside, always through the lens of Jewish culture, oft times amplified by sexual identity.<br>--<i>ForeWord Reviews</i> <p/>Candid, cunning, brave, and wickedly funny--Jason K. Friedman's <i>Fire Year</i> will make you remember the first time you read Philip Roth. Love, lust, religious tradition, the new South, the transcendent promise of faith, the liberating hope of sexual awakening--he twists all of them together here in stories as true to our goofy joys as to our deepest intuitions.<br>--Salvatore Scibona<br><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br>Jason K. Friedman was born in Savannah, GA, earned a BA from Yale, and an MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. His work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies including <i>Best American Gay Fiction</i> and the cultural-studies reader <i>Goth: Undead Subculture.</i> He has published two children's books, including the thriller <i>Phantom Trucker</i>. He was runner-up in the Associated Writing Programs Award Series in the Novel, and he won the Karma Foundation-Moment Magazine Short Fiction Prize for "Blue," the first story in <i>Fire Year</i>. Jason works as a technical writer in San Francisco, where he lives with his husband, filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman, and their dog, Lefty.
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