I was moved by Gary Fincke‘s Flannery O’Connor Award winning collection Sorry I Worried You. The protagonists of these stories are not lightweights–that’s for sure. Often they are unreliable or even menacing and they are not afraid to show the reader their dark hearts, their secret places. So, too, the stories within are neither light nor easy–they are dark, complex, often funny, but more often tragic. Still, for some there is a light at the end of each tunnel–it may be a dim light, but it’s there in the form of hope.
My favorite story of the bunch is the timely “Book Owner”–a sort of catalog of one man’s life long obsession with all things writing (including plagarism, hypergraphia, and literary hoaxes) and compulsive lying–which leads him into and out of the Vietnam war, after which he comes back home and fulfills his destiny.
myfanwy collins 