Outside Looking In: Short Stories

Jonathan Blum grew up in Miami and graduated from UCLA and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author, previously, of the novella, Last Word. His short stories have appeared in Angels Flight, literary west, The Carolina Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Playboy, Sonora Review, and in Shanxi Literature, among others. He has taught fiction writing at The University of Iowa, Drew University, and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and is the recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, a Hawthornden fellowship in Scotland, and a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. The unlikely heroes of his latest book, a collection of short stories entitled The Usual Uncertainties (Rescue Press), are trying to make their way in the world in the face of struggles big and small, both ancestral and circumstantial. This collection is a compelling blend of tragic and comical, quiet and radiant.