Can I read Desert Gothic (Iowa Short Fiction Award) on EtoBox?

Desert Gothic (Iowa Short Fiction Award) by Don Waters; ProQuest (Firm) is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Desert Gothic (Iowa Short Fiction Award) about?

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's 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 divorcé 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.

Author

Don Waters; ProQuest (Firm)

Publisher

University Of Iowa Press; University of Iowa Press

Published

2007

Language

EN

ISBN

9781587297755

Subjects

Short Stories, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Rating

4.13 / 5 (77 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14