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In these gripping and intense stories, Richard Lange returns to the form that first landed him on the literary map.
These are edge-of-your-seat tales: A prison guard must protect an inmate being tried for heinous crimes. A father and son set out to rescue a young couple trapped during a wildfire. An ex-con trying to make good as a security guard stumbles onto a burglary plot. A young father must submit to blackmail to protect the fragile life he's built.
Sweet Nothing is an unforgettable collection that shows once again why T.C. Boyle wrote, "Lange's stories combine the truth-telling and immediacy of Raymond Carver with the casual hip of Denis Johnson. There is a potent artistic sensibility at work here" (on Dead Boys).
"Gamblers, grifters, ex-cons, and those just conning themselves populate this gritty if uneven L.A.-centric second story collection." - Publishers Weekly
"Skillfully constructed ... Lange portrays the lives of people struggling to survive, with the focus on families, both blood-related and chance-made." - Booklist
"Utterly believable postcards from the edge; for those who like their realism not so magical but right there at street level." - Library Journal
"With a distinctive style, Lange makes his downbeat tales of the underclass quirkily entertaining." - Kirkus
"Richard Lange's stories are a revelation. He writes of the disaffections and bewilderments of ordinary lives with as keen an anger and searing lyricism as anybody out there today. He is Raymond Carver reborn in a hard cityscape. Read him and be amazed." - T.C. Boyle, author of San Miguel
"What makes this collection a wonderful read is that it's only marginally akin to anything else. Swift, gut-wrenching, and sometimes cleverly disarming fiction by a master." - Joe R. Lansdale, author of The Thicket and Edge of Dark Water
"For me the best stories are rabbit holes. You read the first lines, maybe a page, and you're down there. Somewhere else. Another life. Richard Lange is one cwazy wabbit." - James Sallis, author of Drive
"His vision is steely-eyed, yet you sense that Lange loves his characters-even the worst of them-and that compassion sharpens your own emotional investment in this powerful brace of stories." - Craig Davidson, author of Cataract City
This information about Sweet Nothing was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Richard Lange was born in Oakland, CA and grew up in California's San Joaquin Valley. He's the author of the novels Angel Baby and This Wicked World and the short story collections Sweet Nothing and Dead Boys. His short stories have appeared in The Sun, The Iowa Review and Best American Mystery Stories, and as part of the Atlantic Monthly's Fiction for Kindle series. He received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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