Press 53 announces the publication on September 23 of Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, Volume II, an anthology of 20 stories by 20 authors set in 20 countries.
With a theme of “It’s a Mysterious World,” this exciting addition to the Everywhere Stories series, edited by award-winning author Clifford Garstang, takes readers on a journey around the globe: to a wrestling match in Turkey, to a mysterious eye doctor in Guatelmala, to a homeless man wandering the streets of Chicago, to a religious school in Samoa, to a drowning in Mexico, to a fortune-telling monk in Korea, to a miraculous hotel in Egypt, and to more stories in countries on every continent.
Contributors include Mark Brazaitis (The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award), Chris Cleary (The Ring of Middletown), James Dorr (The Tears of Isis, a 2014 Bram Stoker Award nominee), Christopher Woods (The Dream Patch), William Kelley Woolfitt (Charles of the Desert), plus Hira Cheema, Rijn Collins, Lucinda Nelson Dhavan, John Matthew Fox, Pamela Hartmann, Joel Hodson, Alison Grifa Ismaili, Robert Kostuck, Barbara Krasner, Gabriela Maya, Frances Park, Brandon Patterson, Brooks Rexroat, Candace M. Robertson, and Frank Scozzari.
Denton Loving, in his review in Pank magazine, said of the first volume, that these stories “are written by writers deeply engaged with the places they write about.
From a pool of 650 submissions, Garstang has curated twenty stories that shatter the surface of storytelling.” As one reader stated in a review on Amazon, “Because I love travelling, and experiencing different cultures, I look for books that can take me on exotic adventures even when I’m landlocked. The stories in this anthology transported me from France to the Congo, from Costa Rica to Iran. The authors varied styles and perspectives kept me reading from cover to cover.”
Garstang is the author of What the Zhang Boys Know (Press 53, 2012), winner of the 2013 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction, and the prize-winning linked story collection In an Uncharted Country (Press 53, 2009). After receiving a BA in Philosophy from Northwestern University, Garstang served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea, where he taught English at Jonbuk University. He then earned an MA in English and a JD, magna cum laude, both from Indiana University, and practiced international law in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Singapore with one of the largest law firms in the United States. Subsequently, he earned a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and worked for Harvard Law School as a legal reform consultant in Almaty, Kazakhstan. From 1996 to 2001, he was Senior Counsel for East Asia at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., where his work focused on China, Vietnam, Korea, and Indonesia.
“Because of my own international experience,” says Garstang, “first as a Peace Corps volunteer and then as an international lawyer, I’ve always been interested in multicultural fiction and stories set outside the U.S. Travel definitely broadens the mind, and the next best thing to travel is reading.”
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