The stories in PRECARIOUS are about doing the right thing and regretting it. About making bets and dancing naked.They play out in rain-soaked Seattle and drought-stricken California. In the front seat of Mom's Malibu and a vacation cabin on Cape Cod. On a tiny island and in a desert filled with light and heat and sand that slips through your fingers like friendships you once had.In these fifteen stories you will meet a boy trying to make it through that summer between the end of high school and the start of something else. A woman attracted to a man with muscles, because it makes her feel safe . . . until it doesn't. A man who can only imagine what it's like to sleep with many different women, but that's OK-he has a good imagination. In prose that is by turns spare and lyrical, the stories of PRECARIOUS capture the feeling of late summer. A never-ending game of Kick the Can. All sense of time lost among the stars.
Al Riske is the author of the novel Sabrina's Window and the story collection Precarious. He has worked as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, copywriter, and ghostwriter. His short stories have appeared in the Beloit Fiction Journal, Hobart, Pindeldyboz, Switchback, Word Riot, Blue Mesa Review, and 34th Parallel. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, he now lives in California with his wife, Joanne, and their dog, Bodie.
Childhood Ambition: Be the best writer who ever lived. (I was 10 and had never heard of Shakespeare.)
Little-Known Fact: Had first story published (on a mimeograph machine) when in the fourth grade.
Honors: Winner of the Blue Mesa Review Fiction Contest in 2008 for the short story "Pray for Rain." Nominated for the 2010 Story Prize, an annual award for short story collections, for Precarious.
Influences: John Knowles, Earnest Hemingway, Philip Roth, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Tallent, Milan Kundera, Catherine Ryan Hyde.
Personal blog: Thoughts with Nowhere Else to Go
