Desert Gothic

This powerful debut collection, set in the light-filled deserts of Nevada and Arizona, introduces a darkly inventive new voice. Like an early Richard Ford, Don Waters writes with skill, empathy, and an edgy wit of worlds not often celebrated in contemporary literature. In
Desert Gothic , Waters unleashes a wild and gritty cast and points them down paths of reckoning, where the characters earn the grace of their hard-won wisdom. Set in bars, mortuaries, nursing homes, truck stops, and the
poverty motels that encircled downtown’s casino corridor,
Waters’ ten stories are full of misfit transients like Julian, a crematorium worker who decorates abandoned urns to create a
lush underground island,
and the instant Mormon missionary Eli, a hapless divorce who
always likes people better when they’re a little broken.
Limo drivers, ultra-marathoners, vagabonds, and a distraught novelist-to-be populate the pages of these gritty stories. 2007 Iowa short fiction award