"WINS AND LOSSES," by Peter Makuck, Syracuse University Press, $19.95, 200 pages (f)
Peter Makuck, who is a Pulitzer Prize nominee for his 2010 work "Long Lens," the founding editor of the journal Tar River Poetry and a previous visiting professor at Brigham Young University in 1990 and 2000, has just released a new collection of short stories titled "Wins and Losses."
Like Makuck’s previous three collections of short stories, "Wins and Losses" explores life in small, rural American towns. One of the unique pleasures of reading "Wins and Losses" is enjoying Makuck’s talent for introducing characters the same way one would get to know people in real life: not all at once, but organically — a fragment of a conversation overheard here, a gesture there, a speculation shared in a diner or in a parked car.
It’s the stitching together of these snatches of information that, by the end of each story, makes the reader feel not that the characters are merely actors on the stage of some written page but real people living real lives in some real town, the sort of town one would likely otherwise drive right past on the way to somewhere else, never giving a second thought to all the hopes and disappointments, happiness and heartache it contains.
For example, in the story "Nickel-Plated Pistol" (originally published in the Cimarron Review), a mysterious surrogate uncle wafts in and out of the narrator’s life, his intentions and personality as undefined to the young narrator (and the reader) as the edges of smoke. Then, with a complexity masked by Makuck’s straightforward writing style, the last few paragraphs achieve what every short story should strive for but few are able to accomplish — the shock of an ending that somehow manages to be both unexpected and inevitable. To say more would risk spoiling the effect, but if one were to read nothing more than that one story, the price of the book would still be a bargain.
Makuck and his wife, Phyllis, both recovering from bouts with cancer, live on Bogue Banks, one of North Carolina’s barrier islands.
If you go …
What: Peter Makuck reading
When: Friday, April 7, noon
Where: Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo
Web: lib.byu.edu
Michael Monson is a Utah native, attended both the University of Utah and BYU, and writes on topics ranging form the law to fiction. Email: michaelmonson84@gmail.com