Michael Kardos
Michael Kardos is the Pushcart Prize-winning author of six books of fiction, including the novel Fun City Heist and the story collection One Last Good Time. He is also the author of The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer’s Guide. He lives with his family in Delaware.
by Michael Kardos
Publication date: March 5
Purchase a copy and meet Michael at AWP in Baltimore, MD (Press 53, booth 610), March 5-7
Pre-orders ship before the publication date
ISBN 978-1-968783-02-0
8.5 × 5.5-inch softcover, 180 pages
Includes two Pushcart Prize-winning stories!
These electrifying stories alert us to our own human capacity for growth and regression, through dozens of literary judo flips after which we must reassess everything we thought we knew about the world. ─Phong Nguyen
Winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award for Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-935708-10-0
8.5 x 5.5 softcover, 185 pages
Praise for Quick Change
Kardos is a master of the craft, one of the finest American short story writers of this quarter-century. These stories are a perfect blend of the traditional and the innovative, compelling action rooted in character but with detours along the way that surprise, delight, or horrify us . . . and often all three simultaneously. Just when you think you know what Kardos is up to, a lie is told, shots are fired, a tiger appears—and the story winds up in unexpected and fascinating new territory. A must-read for any lover of short fiction.
─Susan Perabo, author of Why They Run the Way They Do: Stories and The Fall of Lisa Bellow: A Novel
Quick Change is an apt title for a book of stories where the pace of revelation is rapid-fire. Epiphanies explode in succession. Lightning strikes again and again. Lives are changed forever. These electrifying stories alert us to our own human capacity for growth and regression, through dozens of literary judo flips after which we must reassess everything we thought we knew about the world. Through tales that range from a century in the past, at the peak of the vaudeville era, to an alternative future in which Reality TV has gone feral, Kardos evokes a culture that both reveres monsters and tries to kill them. And like the best writers of human nature, Kardos reveals those moments when his protagonists catch harrowing glimpses of the monster within.
─Phong Nguyen, author of Bronze Drum
Praise for One Last Good Time
“One Last Good Time is one of the sharpest, funniest, and most compassionate debuts you will ever have the good fortune to read. Without a doubt, Michael Kardos is a truly gifted writer and a vibrant new voice in American letters.”
—Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff
“Michael Kardos’s stories go to a place very few writers ever manage to get: a place of true goodness. There’s not a single story here that doesn’t peer into its characters’ lives, and into their hearts, and remind us that life is good.”
—Michelle Herman, author of Dog and The Middle of Everything
“In One Last Good Time, Michael Kardos gives us a book that, in story after story, is not only funny, but laugh-out-loud funny; not only poignant, but heart-wrenching. I’ve never read anything quite like it—and I will read it again and again and again.”
—Christopher Coake, author of We’re in Trouble
“Michael Kardos’s soulful stories take place in that hard-luck corner of New Jersey where rock and roll dreams crash into blue-collar reality. One Last Good Time is a remarkable debut collection, full of stories that are funny and melancholy at the same time.”
—Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher