LIVING AMONG STRANGERS

"Reading Living Among Strangers is like watching a series of Beckett plays recast in the percussive, irreverent voice of a writer who takes nothing for granted, who follows the possibilities inherent in language and in everyday human failings. Here are characters estranged from the world: unparented kids walking the train trestle, a widowed mother whose pack of daughters push her toward assisted living, an alcoholic trying to give up drink by questioning the very root of desire. It is in the characters’ estrangement that the reader finds kinship. As with the manicured Floridian lawns of Bahia Vista Estates in the title story, in this collection, “[t]here are rumors, things under the surface, things man-made and not.” Richard Schmitt is a writer who digs beneath the surface to yield up beauty in the coarse, wisdom in the baffled." (Jessie van Eerden , the author  of a novel Glorybound) “Richard Schmitt is a storyteller. His stories seem not to start so much as startle, drawing us into a world that might feel familiar, but that we’ve never seen quite this way. Like one of his narrators, he knows to ignore the map, point his nose, and go. The magic is in his sentences, which at their best are sleek and strange and urgent, surprising and illuminating." (Peter Turchi, the author of A Muse and A Maze )

Paperback: 236 pages Publishing date: November 19, 2017 Language: English ISBN-10: 0999516426 ISBN-13: 978-0999516423 Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.6 x 9 inches

Richard Schmitt is the author of The Aerialist, a novel (Harcourt, 2000), and has published fiction and nonfiction in Arts & Letters, Cimarron Review, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, North American Review, Puerto del Sol, and other places. His story, “Leaving Venice, Florida,” won 1st Prize in The Mississippi Review story contest. He has been anthologized in New Stories of the South: The Year’s Best 1999 and The Best American Essays, 2013.