The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

Five thousand years out of the labyrinth, the Minotaur finds himself in the American South, living in a trailer park and working as a line cook at a steakhouse. No longer a devourer of human flesh, the Minotaur is a socially inept, lonely creature with very human needs. But over a two-week period, as his life dissolves into chaos, this broken and alienated immortal awakens to the possibility for happiness and to the capacity for love.

Steven Sherrill is a graduate of UNC Charlotte and holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The recipient of a NEA Fellowship for Fiction, he has published four novels and one book of poetry. His debut novel, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, was published in the UK and translated into eight languages. Neil Gaiman selected it as one of six audio books to launch Neil Gaiman Presents for Audible.com. A prolific painter and nascent musician, Sherrill is now a professor of English & Integrative Arts at Penn State Altoona.

… [W]ry, melancholy, beautiful first novel …
-The Guardian

Sherrill’s narrative, with its dreamlike pace, shows myth coexisting with reality as naturally as it does in ancient epic. -Publishers Weekly

Wise and ingenious -The New York Times