John Brandon reads from "Further Joy"

“[John Brandon] gravitates to the kind of regional misfits who drew Flannery O’Connor’s eye, and his dialogue is snappy and eccentric, like a combination of two masters of the craft, Elmore Leonard and Charles Portis.”--The New York Times

In Further Joy, his new collection of thirteen stories, John Brandon gives us a stunning assortment of men and women at the edge of possibility--gamblers and psychics, assassins and priests, all of them on the verge of finding out what they can get away with, and what they can't. Ranging from ruined paradises to forgotten islands, from haunted deserts to alligator-filled swamps, these are stories of foul luck and strange visitations, delivered with deadpan humor by an unforgettable voice.

----

John Brandon's three novels are Arkansas, Citrus County, and A Million Heavens. He has spent time as the Grisham Fellow in Creative Writing at University of Mississippi, and the Tickner Writing Fellow at Gilman School, in Baltimore.  His work has appeared in Oxford American, GQ, Grantland, ESPN the Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, and numerous literary journals.  He now lives in St. Paul, and teaches at Hamline University. Further Joy is his first story collection.