A01=Erin Flanagan
Author_Erin Flanagan
Betrayal
Category=FYB
Category=GTM
Creative Writing
Death
Deception
eq_anthologies-novellas-short-stories
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
Fiction
Great Plains
Infidelity
Medical Fraud
Midwest
Neo-Nazi
Short Stories
Story Collection
Product details
- ISBN 9780803220294
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 01 Sep 2005
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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These characters may be the usual suspects, making the usual mistakes, but their stories are not the usual fare. Populated by pretenders, ex-cons, and wannabes who bend the rules, break the law, and risk everything to salvage their own hearts, the twelve stories in The Usual Mistakes conduct readers into a world where betrayal is just a beginning. Deception, infidelity, even death—where a person goes from there is the mainspring of Erin Flanagan’s fiction, and in the turns her characters take, we find rare insights: that we are often wedded to one another because of, not in spite of, our flaws and that this paradoxical connection may be cause for hope. An impostor medical assistant and an ex-neo-Nazi, covered head-to-toe in swastika tattoos; a seemingly oafish but suddenly sympathetic husband and a boorish mother-in-law in need of comforting; a young boy who finds adulthood by learning to forgive: the characters in these stories are by turns inappropriate, outlandish, selfish, and kind, complicated in the ways only real people are. Though they ask for little and rarely get even that, they do astonishing things with whatever does come their way; and their stories, in Flanagan’s sure hands, never fail to surprise.
Erin Flanagan’s short fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Baltimore Review, South Carolina Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Connecticut Review, the anthology Best New American Voices 2001, and elsewhere.
