Tacoma Stories

ACCLAIMED WRITER, BOOKSELLER FAVORITE: Richard Wiley has received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Maria Thomas Fiction Award, and Washington State Book Award. He has also been inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Wiley’s most recent novel, Bob Stevenson, was lauded by independent booksellers from Massachusetts to Tacoma who celebrated its loveable, quirky characters and called it fun and ingenious in their recommendations.

POPULAR FORMAT OF INTERCONNECTED SHORT STORIES: Tacoma Stories follows in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg, Ohio by uniting stories with recurring characters around a singular town. While the marketplace can be challenging for short stories, linked collections such as Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge and Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad continue to garner awards, sales, and dedicated readerships on the same level as novels. Wiley’s collection similarly offers an ideal bridge between the genres, pairing the compressed ingenuity of the short story form with a sustained examination of place and character.

SPOTLIGHT ON TACOMA, REGIONAL CHARM: At the tender age of twenty, Wiley became a bartender at Pat’s Tavern in Tacoma, the same bar that connects all of the characters in these stories. While Wiley, a previous recipient of the Washington State Book Award, was born in Tacoma and has returned to it throughout his life, he spent many years living abroad and most of his fiction is grounded in locales ranging from Korea to Kenya to Japan. This is the first of his nine books in which he turns all of his attention toward his native Pacific Northwest.